One reason why I left Linux
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Many of you don't know this guy, but he's called Eric S. Raymond and he was one of the initiators of the Open Source movement in the early days, and being one of the most fervent supporters and evangelizers still today (perhaps, not as much as Saint Richard Stallman of the GNU Church - that picture is true!! It's actually him!
) Anyway, he knows what he's doing and he was trying to configure a networked printer at home and he had quite a hard time, so he wrote an eassy about it: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story. He has a few good points in there...To those of you not very familiar with open source, this will perhaps be somewhat less interesting but it tells two things: 1) Why OSS is not quite "there" yet, in terms of quality of software and 2) Why I stopped using Linux, sick of fighting with countless configuration files. And you know what the funny thing is? Apple is using the very same printing framework (called CUPS), same tools, same config files, same everything in Mac OS X but with a different graphic tool to configure, and the difference in ease of use is just incredible.
Install Internet Explorer in Linux
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
I don't know why anybody would need to do that but it is possible ssing Wine, the Windows emulator Have a look at the instructions here. 47.000$/year selling items from an on-line game
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Fucking hell, this guy is making more money by selling items of the on-line game Ultima Online than probably most of us working 8-10h a day, 5 days a week. To be precise, he's making 47.000$ a year!!! I can't believe it, so now you're telling me that by being addicted to my favourite on-line game I can be rich? Oh well, now I only need to find a good game and play until extenuation!!!
Linklogs
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Links, Blogging, Fun, Geeky | 0 Comments
I have recently become quite addicted to some pages that work as "linklogs". In other words, they just collect links to interesting pages in the net... These are my favourite linklogs:- Fark: My favourite one Lots of links every day classified in categories such as "Dumbass", "Cool", "Spiffy", "Scary" or even "Boobies" (gues what goes into the "Boobies" section? )
- Blogdex: This one is supposed to track the most popular links in the blogosphere... Sometimes there's nothing worth checking out in it.
- del.icio.usThe tagline of this linklog is "collaborative bookmars" and apparently anybody can submit links to them. Interesting.
- Diveintomark.org blinks: Mark Pilgrim's collection of interesting links. Mostly geek-related and not updated very often... But worth checking nonetheless.
- BoingBoing: Also lots of stuff here, though every link usually comes with an article talking about it that of course you can always ignore
How to make your OSX run faster
25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: Geeky, Apple | 4 Comments
Get enough RAM
Yes, that's 1.25Gb of RAM in my precioussss PowerBook G4
Windows NT4 and 2000 code leaked to the Internet
25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments
Several sources have reported (this was the first) that part of the source code of both Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 was leaked a few days ago from Microsoft to the Internet. Some analysts have acknowledged the source code as the real one though they have confirmed that very little could be done with it since some parts are missing. The code seems to have come from MainSoft, according to this other article. MainSoft is a partner of Microsoft and they are one of the two partners that have access to the source code of Windows. MainSoft specializes in porting Windows software to Unix platforms, and for example they ported IE and Windows Media Player 6.x to Unix. The code was stored in a Linux machine but it is still unclear how that machine was compromised.The consequences are plentyful: the easiest thing one can derive from this is that more bugs that could help to spawn more deadly and dangerous worms than ever. That'd be cool (ok, maybe not), but let's not forget that the MyDoom worm and its variants (the fastest spreading Internet worm ever) were developed without needing to even look at such source code. Also, this proves that security through obscurity is not the way... Let's look at the success of the Linux operating systems and other successful open-source projects: the more eyes looking at it, the better and faster bugs can be fixed and new features can be added. Perhaps Microsoft is ashamed that the whole world will be able to clearly see how things are done in there, and why Microsoft Windows has such bad track of security holes and bugs.
There are more consequences that can even do good to Microsoft in the not so distant future. Now that everybody has been able to peek at the code, any notorious improvement in projects such as WINE (a Windows emulation layer for Linux), Samba (free and better implementation of Microsoft's file-transfer protocol) or even ReactOS (an OS trying to achieve binary compatibility with Windows 2000), could be stopped by Microsoft alleging that they have made use of copyrighted technology. If they can in any way prove that any of those projects used the stolen code, even if only for "inspiration", they would be able to completely stop the project. And *that* is really the scary part. To tell you the truth, I don't give dog shit about any new worm targetted at Windows system: after all, people have it well deserved for being so unconscious and for helping a company like Microsoft to dominate the market. I for one am glad that left the world of Windows many years ago...
Anyway, people believe that Windows is the cheapest alternative out there because let's face it, for most of them it costs nothing. As some of you know, I work for quite a big company and they are standardized on Windows 2000 but just this week we received an urgent email from the IT service letting us know that our machines were going to be remotely and automatically updated before two days unless we manually did it ourselves. Can you imagine how many man hours the service desk guys had to work to download the patches, test them, make sure that they work in all the possible configurations of laptops that we all have? And then, they must have had lots of fun seeing the remote installation servers crawl to its knees when thousands, literally, thousands of people tried to pull those patches (the update was about 140Mb) Believe me, the premium price you pay in money for OS X of the premium price you pay as a little bit more of your time for configuring Linux is later on worth the effort...
And now, let me briefly show you the safest and more secure to run Windows XP in a computer: in an emulated sandbox in my PowerBook G4, running OS X 10.3.2. Look below:
Yes, that's really Windows XP running in a Mac. The speed is of course not as fast as when it runs natively but it works and it is usable. And even if I get a worm, I don't care that much