Slashdot Mirror

there you go:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742

the rest of the links are in there.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742

Check out this article posted by George Ou at ZDNet a couple of weeks ago.

The reason Comcast is doing this is because the shared node topology of Cable can't handle all of the connection requests. Similar to a bunch of Windows 95 boxes running NETBUI on a large non-switched network, bittorrent causes a a ton of contention. The result are packet storms which end up taking everyone out.

Of course Comcast won't say, "The reason we do this is because our entire infrastructure is shit and needs to be replaced." The stockholders wouldn't like that.

WEP is useless and can be cracked in less than 10 minutes using any laptop made in the last 10 years. Keep on using that WPA though.
MAC filtering is useless because anyone with Kismet can see the active MAC addresses on the network.
SSID hiding is useless because anyone with Kismet can see the active SSIDs around them.

Someone mentioned it earlier, but have a look at this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=43

From TFA: "its abusive use of hated DRM"

I'm tired of this myth. I've been using Vista for a while now, and I've never encountered any 'abusive DRM' that prevented my from doing anything I could already do in XP.

I suggest people read this before beleiving the people blindly yelling 'Vista DRM Sux':
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

From TFA: "its abusive use of hated DRM"

I'm tired of this myth. I've been using Vista for a while now, and I've never encountered any 'abusive DRM' that prevented my from doing anything I could already do in XP.

I suggest people read this before beleiving the people blindly yelling 'Vista DRM Sux':
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

From TFA: "its abusive use of hated DRM"

I'm tired of this myth. I've been using Vista for a while now, and I've never encountered any 'abusive DRM' that prevented my from doing anything I could already do in XP.

I suggest people read this before beleiving the people blindly yelling 'Vista DRM Sux':
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

See George Ou's ZDNet column: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=829

I followed George Ou's guide and built a great NAS for real cheap. I upgraded a few components and ended up spending $500 for the parts then I spent another $500 on five 500gb drives to setup a RAID 5. Of course you could spend a lot less, its getting cheap to build your own system these days. Here's the article for reference Build the $340 NAS for half the price but double the speed

Before you begin rootkitting your customers, ask yourself: should I really entrust my company's security architecture to Charles Darwin?

Hey man -- I appreciate your reply..

I agree with what you say about companies playing waiting games with release cycles. The correct response from MS would be to not try and 'game' the system by timing their SPs and OS releases in such a way that there is a huge gap between them -- they should just focus on making each release as good as they can. Many many companies may very well skip Vista and go directly to Windows 7. One of my previous companies is still using Win2k Pro on desktops and XP on laptops, and is in all probability going to skip XP (on desktops) and go to Vista directly (I still have close friends there, hence I know). Assuming the Win2k machines are still doing the job they were intended to do, this means the company derived excellent value from its Win2k deployment and had probably scoped out its requirements and architected and administered it well. This is a success story for the company as well as MS. I guess the point is, companies certainly aren't going to deploy Vista just because it exists -- they will deploy it if and when they need to, and if the need doesn't arise until post-Windows 7, well, they'll probably deploy that instead. That's just the nature of IT, and MS is doing a good job if they are able to create OSes that remain viable in the enterprise for 5+ year cycles.

The Vista DRM infestation, I assure you, is merely a meme that has spread on /. -- its one of those things that has been repeated often enough that everyone believes its true. I run Vista and rip music, use media center with a capture card, stream 720p (terrestrial HD broadcast) recorded shows to my xbox, etc. etc. -- I have yet to come across something that I could do in XP that I cannot do in Vista.

For a very detailed and well-researched piece busting the Vista DRM infestation myths see here (warning: it's a long read):
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

You may not agree 100% with the entire piece -- but even at 75% agreement I hope you'll see my point.

Hey man -- I appreciate your reply..

I agree with what you say about companies playing waiting games with release cycles. The correct response from MS would be to not try and 'game' the system by timing their SPs and OS releases in such a way that there is a huge gap between them -- they should just focus on making each release as good as they can. Many many companies may very well skip Vista and go directly to Windows 7. One of my previous companies is still using Win2k Pro on desktops and XP on laptops, and is in all probability going to skip XP (on desktops) and go to Vista directly (I still have close friends there, hence I know). Assuming the Win2k machines are still doing the job they were intended to do, this means the company derived excellent value from its Win2k deployment and had probably scoped out its requirements and architected and administered it well. This is a success story for the company as well as MS. I guess the point is, companies certainly aren't going to deploy Vista just because it exists -- they will deploy it if and when they need to, and if the need doesn't arise until post-Windows 7, well, they'll probably deploy that instead. That's just the nature of IT, and MS is doing a good job if they are able to create OSes that remain viable in the enterprise for 5+ year cycles.

The Vista DRM infestation, I assure you, is merely a meme that has spread on /. -- its one of those things that has been repeated often enough that everyone believes its true. I run Vista and rip music, use media center with a capture card, stream 720p (terrestrial HD broadcast) recorded shows to my xbox, etc. etc. -- I have yet to come across something that I could do in XP that I cannot do in Vista.

For a very detailed and well-researched piece busting the Vista DRM infestation myths see here (warning: it's a long read):
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

You may not agree 100% with the entire piece -- but even at 75% agreement I hope you'll see my point.

Hey man -- I appreciate your reply..

I agree with what you say about companies playing waiting games with release cycles. The correct response from MS would be to not try and 'game' the system by timing their SPs and OS releases in such a way that there is a huge gap between them -- they should just focus on making each release as good as they can. Many many companies may very well skip Vista and go directly to Windows 7. One of my previous companies is still using Win2k Pro on desktops and XP on laptops, and is in all probability going to skip XP (on desktops) and go to Vista directly (I still have close friends there, hence I know). Assuming the Win2k machines are still doing the job they were intended to do, this means the company derived excellent value from its Win2k deployment and had probably scoped out its requirements and architected and administered it well. This is a success story for the company as well as MS. I guess the point is, companies certainly aren't going to deploy Vista just because it exists -- they will deploy it if and when they need to, and if the need doesn't arise until post-Windows 7, well, they'll probably deploy that instead. That's just the nature of IT, and MS is doing a good job if they are able to create OSes that remain viable in the enterprise for 5+ year cycles.

The Vista DRM infestation, I assure you, is merely a meme that has spread on /. -- its one of those things that has been repeated often enough that everyone believes its true. I run Vista and rip music, use media center with a capture card, stream 720p (terrestrial HD broadcast) recorded shows to my xbox, etc. etc. -- I have yet to come across something that I could do in XP that I cannot do in Vista.

For a very detailed and well-researched piece busting the Vista DRM infestation myths see here (warning: it's a long read):
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 2)
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)

You may not agree 100% with the entire piece -- but even at 75% agreement I hope you'll see my point.

What complaints? You can read some of the debunking of the DRM FUD here http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=309&page=1 Read parts 1 and 2 of that series too.

From http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6715

Mozilla Corporation doesn't care; they've already made plan to give Thunderbird the boot.

I'm not sure how the Mozilla Foundation feels about Thunderbird, though.

Well, they're creating a subsidiary and giving it $3m to start, so they clearly have some interest in it.

I saw a great point by point response to this NYT article on ZDNet http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=679 (favorite part is that most of it was written on the shadow). Honestly the NYT article feels like the author desperately wants to find flaws in the phone and will follow faulty logic to get there. Things like "two button presses to unlock is too many" make no sense, if it was one button press you'd be unlocking it accidentally all the time. Two button presses is the minimum to actually be effective as a phone lock. I read a lot of reviews (including both the NYT article and ZDNET response) and finally picked the shadow up Saturday. So far I love it. Just enough smartphone features to be convenient without overwhelming. Lack of 3G is kind of a bummer, but not a big deal. I'm not surfing the net constantly, just getting directions occasionally.

Here's a good article that counterpoints Pogue's review. http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=679
It questions some of Pogue's experiences.

nope, I was thinking that they realised their gaffe has really backfired and there was nowhere else left for them to go. So they simply packed up and went home.

On the assumption that these people are not entirely stupid:

1. If they were really working to break MS Office dominance, they would have realised by now that what they have said was completely stupid, and may have brought harm to the "cause", as the damages were amplified by clueless "journalists" and "analysts" (e.g. http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=875)

2. If they were MS stooges, the credibility required to carried out their work successfully was pretty much destroyed.

Nothing more to do in either case, to continue hanging onto the empty name of OpenDocument Foundation would be farcical on the same scale as Enderle or DiDio.

Matthew Miller from ZDNet's The Mobile Gadgeteer: http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=679

This is basically a blow-by-blow refutation of Pogue's article. Enjoy.

The iphone actually has a chip, that natively interprets java bytecode as an alternative native language command set, built into it. So I doubt very much that you'd see much of a performance difference between native and Java apps.

"ARM processors traditionally support two instruction sets; ARM state, with 32-bit instructions and Thumb state which compresses the most commonly used instructions into 16-bit format. The Jazelle technology extends this concept by adding a third instruction set, Java bytecode, to the capability of the processor, together with a new Java state."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=338

Some press reports say that Java is an essential component of Android. This is the only direct reference I've found the OHA site:"

"Thanks to the availability of our Jbed(TM) Java(TM) VM on the Android platform, we offer immediate compatibility to the standard Java ME world to enable Java ME-based mobile services with the Android platform." -- Jean-Claude Martinez, CEO of Esmertec

There are other Java-oriented companies involved.

Here's a good summary of the speculation: http://www.screaming-penguin.com/node/7316

And here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6900

And besides, I doubt there is any fundamental reason why you couldn't port a native C/C++ based toolkit to the iPhone's OS X.

Here are the last four quarters of Novell revenue, as per SEC filings, in Ugly Slashdot Table Format:

Q4 2006 Q1 2007 Q2 2007 Q3 2007
10/31/06 01/31/07 04/30/07 07/31/07
244,905 224,596 463,752 243,135 (in thousands)

Notice the Q2 '07 pop. This must have been when Microsoft paid up. But that income wasn't recognized as the usual license, maintenance, subscription, etc. fees that show up in the quarterly reports as "Total net revenue." Those numbers (in thousands) for the past few quarters are:

Q1/06 242,294
Q2/06 193,086
Q3/06 236,271
Q4/06 244,905
Q1/07 244,905
Q2/07 197,433
Q3/07 243,135

In short, they're doing pretty much as they were doing before the Microsoft deal. Including losses from operations, quarter after quarter. All of this is indicative of why NOVL is a $7 stock. Their management team simply isn't up to it.

All of this is in Novell's quarterly reports at: http://www.novell.com/company/ir/qresults/

Also, when this story broke back in February,"...Microsoft will annually purchase as part of a resale arrangement approximately 70,000 coupons, with a mix of priority and standard support, for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server maintenance subscriptions." See "Microsoft and Novell: Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse" at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/index.php?p=2369

So once a year Novell can get a revenue pop, but it looks as if they've been unable to translate this into service agreements that *aren't* through Microsoft. Certainly not to the point of remotely compensating for the damage they've done to themselves in the community. If they can't succeed in that, (and we don't know what percentage of those 70K coupons are actually being used) then Microsoft has a potentially large amount of control over Novell's bottom line.

Given Novell's lack of growth, I imagine some investors are unhappy anyway. Novell are about a $1.2B/yr company. If MS were to threaten to take their revenue down 20-30% when this agreement expires in 2012, which they could do simply by allowing the agreement to lapse, I wonder just what they might force Novell to go along with?

MS has a history of treating 'partners' the way we'd treat a Kleenex, and of some very unethical business practices. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a couple of ways this could end in tears. If it's only Novell doing the weeping, I could care less. They knew the history of partnering with Microsoft when they did the deal. But I don't trust Microsoft at all, and now I don't trust Novell, either, due to them having done the deal to begin with, and now as a possible hostage.

People are actually using vista/longhorn/2003?

Ya, in fact more people are using Vista than all the Macs users combined. And Vista didn't quite meet their sales expectations. Strange uh?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=598
BTW Old Article link, last numbers I saw Vista sales were close to 100 million.

People should note this when they think OS X is taking over the world, it is little more than a 'press/marketing' thorn to MS, and even if the Apple user base doubles 3 or 4 times, it would still be irrelevant to MS...

some of the brightest young developers in the world work for Google

but google was caught demonstrating age discrimination, and so.... yes..... the developers there HAVE to be young or they get fired.

link for brian reid and other 'older people' who have gotton the shaft at google:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html

do no evil, huh? bloody LIARS, they are. war is peace, right? 'do no evil' is an unfunny joke.

What about this:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/09/rfid-implants-linked-to-cancer-in-lab-tests/
and this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2848

Sure there are lots of radiation going around our bodies. But the signal strengths are very dissimilar, because of the distances involved with the emitters. When one of these emitters is in our skin or inside us, that distance becomes zero or almost zero. Only one cancer cell is needed to start the disease.

From ZDNet [zdnet.com]:

One of Scotts biggest efforts to date has been to centralize IT operations, pulling functions in from the business units and in some cases stomping out shadow IT functions that inevitably sprout in such a tech-smart company. The company has consolidated 26 data centers to five and eliminated about 1,000 applications in two years, with the goal of taking out another 1,000.

Ballmer found out Scott was using Samba. It was ugly.

The above is a joke taken from pure imagination. Any resemblance to fact is purely co-incidental.

Here's One Title

And there is always SCRAM for the Atari 400/800

2) The license issues are very serious: the BSD licenses allow developers to build on other's work and proprietize it, the GPL insists that it remain available to all customers. That's a big, big deal with the proprietary information and NDA's on new hardware.

Before the installer is launched, I'm fairly certain the user is first prompted with, `".dmg" contains an application. Are you sure you want to continue download ".dmg"?` Unless that was cleverly disabled on their half. Regardless, you still have to give the installer permission by typing in your admin login and password.

If you've gotten that far with your randomly downloaded file from some random untrusted porn site, I hope it bricks your computer as a valuable lesson.

On the bright side, at least it isn't a "run the installer with root privileges and kernel/driver access even though the user isn't an admin" issue, like another operating system I read about...

ask Microsoft!

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1441240
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=724
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx

This is exactly what OLPC needs. Before getting too excited about it, read up on OLPC. Not only does it fail to address real educational concerns, the interface is sufficiently proprietary that these kids aren't going to learn how to use a standard GUI.

Kudos to Microsoft for supporting this platform, and hopefully Classmate PC will be able to bridge this gap with a real system. Certainly the OLPC business model is exciting and I think given the opportunity to buy a student this kind of computer would be something better for students and teachers to work with.

See ZDNET for a story: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=877
The responders are correct. It is "OPTIONAL". I checked as well.

Looks like the admins in question are at fault here.

Hasn't Guttman's paper on Vista DRM been debunked? Or is this more FUD?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723

When you said "hammer" I thought you were talking about this.

Well, if it's been demonstrated time and again that Google has hacked and user data has been stolen, you shouldn't have any trouble citing examples. Since I'm sure such events would have made the press, please post from reputable sources.

Might I also add that Google's text ads are quite a bit less annoying (and less bandwidth heavy) than the now-common Flash, video, audio, and animated GIFs. Are a dozen 20-word ads really slowing down your internet connection and taking up a large portion of your bandwidth?

From your Wikipedia link:

ASLR is enabled by default in Linux since 2.6.20

Since that release was made on 2007-02-05, you could more accurately say that "Linux, of course, has been doing it for months". OpenBSD didn't even really get a strong version of it until 3.8, and that wasn't quite 2 years ago. It sounds like Windows had problems with it as recently as February 2007, but maybe that's fixed now.

This is still fairly cutting-edge stuff. It's not like they just now implemented memory protection for the first time.

Back in 2000, Riding the Bullet had pretty much the same thing happen. Download, and be honest and pay up. The community said "Ha", and downloaded anyway.

For all the talk about "donations" and "giving back to the artists"...free seems to trump even a tiny amount of donation money.

I have had a look at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html and I have to say that some of those "features" that the iWorld are going to have to cough up for, are quite laughable. Six of these features are screensavers - SCREENSAVERS people! Twenty-four of these "features" bundled into an update for iChat and include such innovative things as 'More Smileys'. Oh dear. If Microsoft attempted to get away with this kind of marketing, they'd be fighting lawsuits in Massachusetts or the EU by now.

I don't need to go too deep into the blatant if, latent copying of "features" already found in Windows. I never thought I would ever be able to utter the words 'Cupertino, start your photocopiers' but some of those features look remarkably similar to what we've already seen in Windows Vista for almost a year now. Even Mary J Foley has her doubts http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=505

This is the sixth iteration of version 10 since 2001 and it's going to cost yet another $129 to upgrade. It's been plagued with delays and I think Apple aren't really bothered that much - they are treating their core users with utter contempt. I really believe that Apple is going to swiftly move beyond the traditional desktop arena pretty soon. They've already lured their user base onto x86 so that when they cut 'n' run, you be able to jump to another x86 platform. OK, that's probably a little far-fetched but seriously, I think they're not that bothered about trying to compete with Microsoft feature for feature on the desktop anymore - they may even abandon it altogether and instead focus entirely on swallowing up the lucrative digital multimedia space using an embedded flavour of their OS. Then they can update it with much less scrutiny.

From the article "Stewart, a reverse engineering guru who has been tracking Storm Worm closely" along with his stunning picture can only mean these spammers are TRULY being tracked diligently between his games of WOW and hourly five minute visits to the pr0n sites that these spammers are promoting themselves!

Not only that, but the grandparent post deliberately, I suppose, obscured the issue. The issue is trust, not honest mistakes.

Microsoft's recent sneaky update has caused severe problems: Microsoft Stealth Update and Windows XP repair don't mix. If Microsoft weren't sneaky, at least customers could deal with the mistakes more easily.

Quote from the ZDNet article: "The overall impression that I get as someone who deals directly with the company is that Microsoft believes that it is right and anyone making a fuss is ultimately wrong". It's not surprising to me that billionaire virtual monopolists would have developed arrogance.

However, that's not the REAL problem, in my opinion. The real problem is that people think that Microsoft is a software company that is routinely abusive. But it isn't. Actually, Microsoft is an abuse company that uses software as a means of delivering abuse. I think a lot of people agree that, if you look at it that way, Microsoft is excellent at what it does.

From Peter Gutmann's excellent

Try again.

Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here.

George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.

Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here.

George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.

Quickbooks's "forbidden" behavior: In order to talk to Intuit or third party add-on software (a common occurrence for many users), Quickbooks writes to a part of the registry that requires Administrator privileges. Every competent developer knows this goes against Windows XP (and Windows 2000) programming guidelines. To allow for backwards compatibility, XP was more permissive than Vista. Vista is finally enforcing these guidelines.

Quickbooks, and any other "industry specific app" that requires Administrator privileges, sucks donkey balls.

• Berlind's Testbed - "Microsoft responds on backwards compatibility issue with Intuit QuickBooks"

I know that Mary Jo Foley asked MS if they were an Acacia client, and still hasn't gotten a response. Interestingly, she says that Novell is apparently an Acacia client - just not for this patent (yet), I guess.