Blackmoor Vituperative

The Oracle move may give Linux a little more credibility in enterprise shops, but realistically its credibility is pretty high already. Expect Red Hat to feel some pressure to reduce prices, make more frequent releases, and try to out-innovate Oracle in ways that are not easily copied. Customers will benefit no matter who comes out on top.

(from ZDNet, Red Hat: Unfakeable Linux)

David Berlind, for one, is suffering from a recurring DRM nightmare, and it keeps getting worse. Depending on your point of view, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management. David calls it C.R.A.P. — and warns that we should all be very afraid.

The bogeyman that haunts Ed Bott and so many other Windows users has been Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage. In Vista, this anti-piracy program will only get worse, warns Ed. “Technically, it’s not a kill switch, but it’s arguably a near-death experience for your PC.”

What other terrors has technology wrought? Ten troubling examples:

1. Malware tricks
2. 64-bit drivers
3. Web 2.0 insecurity
4. Honest consumers driven to piracy
5. Virtualized SOA
6. Microsoft Zune
7. Floating nuclear plant
8. The DMCA
9. Electronic voting
10. Traceable ‘PattyMail’

And there’s plenty more scary tech here….

(from ZDNet, Technology that gives us the creeps)

I call “DRM” the “Digital Rights Mafia”, because that’s just what the DRM-pushers are: corrupt sleazeballs who use force to control, coerce, and rip off honest citizens while subverting our legal system in order to line their own pockets. RIAA, MPAA, and legislators who vote for abominations like the DMCA are the new Tammany Hall. Voters and consumers need to wake up and get rid of these scumbags.

The bottom line: Mozilla Firefox 2 is a winner, beating Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on security, features, and overall cool factor and deserving our Editors’ Choice award.

(from ZDNet, Firefox 2 Review & Comparison)

Not all of the extensions (now called “add-ons”) which I used with Firefox 1.5 are available for Firefox 2.0. On the other hand, not all of them are needed anymore. Here is what I am using now:

1. Adblock
2. Adblock Filterset.G Updater
3. ColorZilla
4. CSS Validator
5. DictionarySearch
6. DOM Inspector
7. DownThemAll!
8. Duplicate Tab
9. Forecastfox
10. Google Browser Sync
11. gTranslate
12. Html Validator
13. IE Tab
14. Tabbrowser Preferences
15. ViewSourceWith

Fantasmo Cult Cinema Explosion
Episode 20: A Celebration Of The Destroyer
Friday, November 3, 2006 – 20:00

Few names touch the hearts of action movie fans (particularly those who came of age in the 80’s) as that of Remo Williams. Released in October 1985, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins was an instant cult classic. The film was based on a series of novels (which are still being written to this day) featuring the character of Remo (also known as The Destroyer) and his mentor Chiun. Essentially, Remo is an ex-cop, who is kidnapped/recruited by a secret government agency to become an assassin (under the tutelage of martial arts master Chiun). What makes the books and film so special is the terrific relationship between the two characters, and of course spectacular action sequences. For one special evening, Team Fantasmo will be screening this legendary film on their mammoth screen. As if that weren’t enough, the guest speaker will be none other than the author of The Destroyer series himself, Warren Murphy! In addition to being a prolific novelist, Mr. Murphy is also an accomplished screenwriter. With this in mind, Fantasmo will also be showing one of Mr. Murphy’s early films, the Remo-esque The Eiger Sanction starring Clint Eastwood!

8:00 P.M. – Warren Murphy Speaks!

8:30 P.M. – Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) – A decorated police officer (Fred Ward) is kidnapped by a secret government agency and forced to become an assassin for the United States. Under the care of martial arts master Chiun (Joel Grey), he will be taught to walk on water, dodge bullets, and kill with extreme prejudice. Rated PG-13

10:45 P.M. – The Eiger Sanction (1975) – A former assassin (Clint Eastwood) is brought out of retirement to uncover the identity of a Russian spy, and then eliminate him. Unfortunately, he will have to accomplish his mission by taking part in a treacherous expedition to climb the Eiger mountain. Rated R

Chesapeake Central Library
298 Cedar Road, Chesapeake, VA 23322
(757) 382-6591

As I first mentioned back in May 2005, “it’s to fight terrorism” is the new all-encompassing excuse for anything the US government wants to do now, replacing the earlier excuse of “it’s for the children”. It would appear that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FBI Director Robert Mueller just now got the memo.

Oct 19, 2006

SpamCop and others are monitoring a huge global increase in spam volumes that started late last week. Networks are reporting anywhere from 30-50% increases in spam volume. On our system, this is causing occasional mail delays as our filtering systems struggle with the load. We’re working on installing more systems in the filters to increase our capacity but this won’t be finished for around a week. In the meantime, we may have delays during the middle of the day. We’re aware of the problem and doing what we can to mitigate it until all the new systems are operational.

(from SpamCop Email System News)

I have been getting swamped with spam over the last few days. Most of it has subject lines like “Momentous letter. You must to read.”

We really need a replacement for SMTP. Like, five years ago.

Apple Computer has reported that a small number of its popular video iPods were infected with a virus that targets Windows PCs before they were sold to consumers.

According to a statement issued by the hardware maker on Oct. 17, roughly 1 percent of the iPod Video devices it has shipped since Sept. 12 were loaded with the RavMonE.exe Windows Trojan during manufacturing.

(from eWeek, Apple Shipped iPods Carrying Windows Virus)

I don’t have a comment. I just think it’s funny.

The Department of Homeland Security redesigned its website over the weekend, and now all of the existing links to DHS documknts across the entire WWW are broken.

404 : Page can not be found
We recently redesigned our site and most pages have moved.

Here is a clue for would-be web designers out there. Never break hyperlinks.

I have watched three or four episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica. Although I enjoyed the pilot/miniseries, I find the actual series to be pretty dreary. The cylons we usually see are just run-of-the-mill human religious fanatics (which is both boring and annoying), there’s very little of what I would call science fiction in it, and the real cylons (the ones who LOOK LIKE CYLONS) and cylon raiders rarely occupy the screen for more than a few seconds in each episode. That is true of the episodes I have seen, anyway.

Aside from that, the whole show is dreary. There’s no sense of fun, no sense of adventure, no sense of hope. All of the episodes I have seen have been an hour of dreary grey people leading dreary grey lives, miserable and with no hope of ever not being miserable. I would rather watch a reality show about Russian peasants. At least they dance once in a while.

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways. Board games, computer games, and role-playing games have been inspired by his work; the archive at hplovecraft.com includes an apparently endless list of pop songs—not all of them death metal —that quote or refer to his tales; and there have been around fifty film and television adaptations, although hardly any of these have been more than superficially related to their sources.

(from The New York Review of Books, The Heroic Nerd)

Go read the whole article.