third strike against Canonical (Ubuntu's parent company)

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/359013/c1b70c36dd9fab59/

As before, the fact that it is the extremely balanced Jon Corbet who's saying this that makes it a deal breaker.

I've never...

been *drunk* and at my desk at work!

Thank you, NC!

(funny) "teradata" and "cheap" in the same sentence

from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/teradata_blurr/ :

Of course, it was never going to be cheap. People very rarely use the word "cheap" and "Teradata" in the same sentence. It can be done, but you have to say something like: "Blurr is four times less cheap than the comparable rotating disk appliance from Teradata." But then it is an astonishing eight times less slow.

(criminal) another strike against ISB

this can't be good.  First it was the dean B Rammohan Rao who was on the board of directors of Satyam and voted in a manner that even the man on the street knew was unethical.

Now it seems another director/co-founder of ISB, someone called Anil Kumar, is indicted in the insider trading scam that's currently happening in the US.

I'd been tarring most recent MBAs with the same feather, but it seems ISB is a cut above the rest in malfeasance.

[no web link yet; this is from this morning's DC...]

"no more kaspersky"

well, Eugene Kaspersky turned out to be a proper old moron, which is what you'd expect from someone who makes his living off of Windows' insecurities.

The number of people on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/16/kaspersky_rebukes_net_anonymity/comments/ saying "well that's it, I'm not going to renew my AV license from this joker" or words to that effect is amazing!

(malware) finally, a journalist gets it right

I've ranted before about how most journalists reporting on malware refuse to indict or even mention the operating system that is invariably involved: Microsoft Windows.

Finally, Brian Krebs of the Washington Post does it.

Bluntly and coldly.

Not only that, he recommends not using Windows, at least for banking transactions.  Read the article for some really chilling facts.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/avoid_windows_malware_bank_on.html

Joel on pointers

[...] until one day their professor introduces pointers, and suddenly, they don't get it. They just don't understand anything any more. 90% of the class goes off and becomes PoliSci majors, then they tell their friends that there weren't enough good looking members of the appropriate sex in their CompSci classes, that's why they switched.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html (yes it's quite an old story...)

just in case anyone wants proof...

I mean, I knew it all along, but there are so many sceptics...

http://xkcd.com/224/

how to get rid of old code in a widely used product

quote from http://lwn.net/Articles/354408/

X is no longer stagnant; it is being heavily developed under freedesktop.org. As X has come back to life, its developers have had to do a massive amount of code cleanup. Keith has figured out a fail-safe method for the removal of cruft from an old code base. The steps, he said, are these:

   1. Publish a protocol specification and promise that there will be long-term support.
   2. Realize failure.
   3. "Accidentally" break things in the code.
   4. Let a few years go by, and note that nobody has complained about the broken features.
   5. Remove the code since it is obviously not being used.

Under this model, the XCMS subsystem was broken for five years without any complaints. The DGA code has recently been seen to have been broken for as long. The technique works, so Keith encouraged the audience to "go forth and introduce bugs."