I’m a little surprised that MySpace is getting it’s own IM service. My initial reaction was, “I hope it runs XMPP (or jabber) and not yet another protocol.” But after thinking about it for a while, I decided that some walled gardens are a good thing. Let’s hope the walls are 12 feet high and have barbed-wire to keep all the Emo Kids in.
No, I will not add sk8Rkid to my buddie list!
This is easily the most worthless day of the year to surf the Internet.
P.S. Happy birthday mom. I love you!
Bill Gates looks pretty stupid saying stuff like this about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC).
A little taste of it…
“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.
I can’t help wondering what he would be saying if those systems were going to run Windows on Microsoft hardware.
Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen. Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.
Sour grapes.
D’oh! Bug #34606†says it all! This is bad, bad, bad. Wow, what an oversite!
I’m currently running Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386 on my single user desktop. Let’s see how I do…
gabe@office:~$ sudo grep MyPassword /var/log/* -R
/var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword
/var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch! The admin’s password in PLAIN TEXT! Oh, this is embarrassing for Ubuntu! It gets worse still. Check out the permissions on the file:
gabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.datgabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
That’s right, world readable. Doesn’t get much worse then that. Well, it’s only locally exploitable. Little consolation!
“Welcome to my server. Would you like to own it?”
There is a cool video of the new Digg comment system. It really does look SLICK. Now it will be so much easier make comments like:
Really, Digg could be cool, but the level of discussion is like 12 year-old wannabe chatter. Every now-and-again there is an insightful comment but that hardly makes it worth the time. I haven’t bothered to register a user account there so I don’t really know what options there are to make things less dumb. The point is, that the default page (the face the world sees) is just juvenile. Maybe when Web 2.5 is out things will have improved ;)
This is so stupid, I don’t even know where to start.
Microsoft Corp.’s Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond, Wash., campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which looked at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors.
Sticking in a CD and hitting “Enter” (as suggested below) is interesting? Wow, it must be a slow time of year for the FUDsters.
“Microsoft challenges Linux’s legacy claims”!? What are those claims? Who made them? Let’s be specific… O.K. we give. We’ll let Microsoft’s guy tell us what “Linux’s” claims are. From the article:
“Quite simply, I wanted to examine this factually, using real customer scenarios to test this hypothesis: Can Linux run on older hardware than Windows? In many developing countries and public institutions, such as a local library, they typically don’t have deep technical staff, so they need to use software without lots of modification and customization. This is why our testing focused on installing modern distributions of Linux and modern versions of Windows ‘out of the box’—simply putting the CD-ROM in and installing—on the legacy PC hardware in our lab,” Hilf said.
Asked why he believed there is such a pervasive belief that Linux can run on older hardware, Hilf said the technical capability to modify Linux, to strip it down to run with a minimal set of services and software so that it can run on all sorts of hardware devices, has generated that larger assumption that any type of Linux distribution can run on all sorts of hardware devices.
It looks like the question is “Can Linux run on older hardware than Windows?” If that is the question, then of course we know the answer. Yes, it can. However, a full install of Linux will not run *better* and it may run *worse* then Windows. But really, is that what people are claiming? Is there really a “larger assumption that any type of Linux distribution can run on all sorts of hardware devices”? No, there isn’t. It’s total garbage from the MS camp. It’s a straw man and they know it.
The real claim Linux system admins make is, that Linux can make better use of older hardware. What we are saying is, Linux can take a relatively old box and make a great router or DNS, DHCP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, LDAP, SMB, NTPD, NFS, etc… server. The same box running Windows would likely make a crumby workstation at best - it lacks the same “capability” that makes Linux shine.
The guy doing the talking here knows that this is really what is being “claimed.” No more, no less. They have no real comeback so they frame the discussion by taking about the “larger assumption” and making “lots of modification and customization.” I’m sure Mr. Hilf is an intelligent guy but I will have to disagree with him that a minimal install (the kind that you would do with old hardware) constitutes “lots of modification and customization.” It’s hard to look into these things when your job to produce FUD gets in the way. Too bad.
The most ridiculous part is that a company like Microsoft feels the need to do “studies” like these to keep the eyes of its customers from wandering and “effectively put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything.”
Oh brother, get a life.
This story has me outraged! I can’t believe that a web site would put a “cookie” on my computer!
The National Security Agency’s Internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them. These files, known as “cookies,” disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.
This is so stupid I don’t even know where to begin. It’s your computer. If you don’t want “cookies” from “big brother” or anyone else, don’t allow them! You control your computer not the NSA.
I hope they don’t log what IP address I’m coming from! What’s next, knowing what pages I visited on their server? This could be bad!
This is an attempt to make a mountain out of a molehill and would not be “news” at all if the media wasn’t trying to pile on the Bush administration.
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