Interesting article at OnLamp on the Mono project – an effort to develop the Microsoft .NET Common Language Infrastructure on Linux.
Archive | March, 2004
Don’t Let the FCC Design Your Software and Hardware!
Don’t Let the FCC Design Your Software and Hardware.
The technology community needs to stand with opponents of the movie industry’s software-regulation scheme, also known as the Broadcast Flag. The EFF and others are suing to block stifling rules designed to protect Hollywood at everyone else’s expense.
Meanwhile, PublicKnowledge,org is lining up tech companies to sign comments to the FCC opposing such regulation. There are only three days left to sign before the comment deadline ends. If you’re a tech executive or have the ear of one, please pass along the links and urge him or her to sign.
Posting from Dan Gillmor’s eJournal
Army to Gates: Halt the free software
c|Net features a story, “Army to Gates: Halt the free software” reporting that Microsoft is giving software away to government officials which “places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold.” So, is Microsoft committing bribery?
Maybe we should all send them disks of Mandrake and OpenOffice.org instead.
Microsoft: SourceSafe Automation broken in 6.0d
Heads-up to programmers trying to automate SourceSafe: [kbAlertz – Visual SourceSafe] points to a new Microsoft KnowledgeBase article indicating the Get command is no longer recursive in the latest 6.0d version of SourceSafe: FIX: The Get method behaves differently with VSSVersion and with VSSItem when you use OLE Automation in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d. (837417) – When you create a program that uses Microsoft Visual SourceSafe OLE Automation, the behavior of the Get method with a VSSVersion object and with a VSSItem object in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d is different from the behavior of the Get method with these…
No surprise here: Microsoft thinks that enemies of their enemies are their friends
Microsoft Said to Encourage Big Investment in SCO Group. More evidence emerged about Microsoft’s role in encouraging the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group, a small Utah company. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology]
My website’s down, and so am I :(
So, after four phone calls and nearly an hour on hold, I finally got the straight scoop from my ISP. The DSL they’ve been selling me for the past year is *NOT* a static IP address, as they’d claimed, it’s dynamic. Just lucky it hadn’t changed in 14 months. (They’re refunding the money I’ve paid for a static IP address they didn’t have to sell me.) They’re pretty much in a tizzy in the local office, as they have a number of clients to provision, and no IP addresses to give them. Since they’ve been bought out by a BigCo, they have to wait for the BigCo to deign to let them have a few measly IP addresses so they can pass them out again. In the meantime, I’m stuck with a dynamic IP address, and I’ll have to jury-rig something to keep the website and RSS feeds online as I can. What a pain in the neck.
What does your web server reveal? Google knows.
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal points to a Security Focus article hosted on the Register with some good tips on avoiding publishing every document on your web server onto Google, like the budget spreadsheet or your password files. Worth reading for anyone running a web server. Sometimes Google Knows Too Much. “Security Focus: The perils of Googling. Google is in many ways most dangerous website on the Internet for thousands of individuals and organisations. Most computers users still have no idea that they may be revealing far more to the world than they would want.
Everyone with a Website should read this soberly written but fairly alarming piece. It shows how much we may be exposing, often inadvertantly, on our websites.”
Every vote counts! We think. Somewhere.
Seven thousand Orange County voters were given incorrect ballots, and the efficient electronics system can’t even tell who’s voted was miscounted! I voted yesterday, too, in a local election. I gave my name to the person checking registered voters upon entering the poll, and a second upon leaving. Supervisors monitored both transactions. I was given one and only one ballot, and I feed it through the mark-sense machine myself. The paper ballots were retained in a locked and sealed container. The results were printed in the local paper this morning. I just don’t see anything about this system that needs to be more automated and made less secure!
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal reports ‘Ballots’ Lost in California: Voting Officials Blase. “A registrar of voters who seems more concerned about ducking his responsibilities is saying, essentially, that everything is fine because the margin was lopsided enough to make this screwup meaningless. Oh, that’s a relief.”
The Network is Down, But I’m Feeling Much Better
… is the caption of one of my favorite Dilbert comic strips, with Catbert seen walking away, carrying a baseball bat.
http://www.tedroche.com is down today, as my DSL company (http://www.tdstelecom.com) has misplaced my static IP address. Just what is it about static they don’t understand? If it comes back, you should see tedroche.com re-appear. If not, and you’re really desparate, you can surf to http://64.35.197.147, where it’s hanging out today. Hope to be back tomorrow.
Food for thought…
From OSNews: *The Command Line – The Best Newbie Interface?*. “This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them…”.