Evil Rachel Moss

I don’t know who this broad is. Don’t really much care. But if she’s done something to piss off every rabid feminist, lardass, and asshat from here to Christmas, she can’t be too bad, can she?

It’s amusing to see these bozos all bent out of shape when someone makes fun of them, especially when they have done similiar numbers on other people. Angry Black Woman is especially himlarious when she gets mad. I just hope she realizes most bloggers see her as a farce.

God Wants Me Dead?

According to this convoluted blog, the Almighty is greatly enraged with the fact that I use Linux.

These Microsoft fanboys are something else. Now they are pretending to be Christian bloggers. You Windows lovers have no shame!

SCO’s “UNIX business”

SCO, after getting a legal smack down from Novell, is telling the public it has a potential buyer of its “UNIX business.” This is great, except for the fact that this rosey picture painted by SCO ignores the fact that what SCO has can’t really be called a business.

Between having stock that is virtually worthless, being threatened with delisting, and owing Novell an estimated $25 million in UNIX royalties, SCO is a shell of her former self.

If SCO is able to seal the deal by November 9th, it will prove only one thing: There is at least one company dumber than SCO.

IT Conservative: WTF?

You know, there are moonbats in the IT field too. Besides the obvious, such as Steve Ballmer, Paul Thurrott, and John Dvorak, there is also IT Conservative.

To be fair, he shares my disdain for Richard Stallman’s antics. That’s great. I’ll buy him a beer on account of that. Unfortunately, he goes from being pragmatic to just plain bizarre in claiming:

• Open Source software is the work of Communists hell-bent on destroying capitalism.
• The OpenMoko phone is somehow related to the threat of global terrorism and September 11th.
• DRM-free music is somehow a bad thing

Besides these bizarre claims, this guy’s blog is riddled with glaring factual errors. For example, he claims that Linus Torvalds named Linux after himself. (Anyone who knows anything about the history of Linux knows that it was a friend of Torvalds who provided the name Linux by creating a /linux/ directory on his FTP server to upload the Linux source code- Torvalds had intended to call the project Freax.)

His site is a great read if you are looking for some tongue in cheek humor or the occasional honest and fair criticism of certain aspects of Linux/Free Software. On the other hand, this gentleman is a Redmond fanboy who hates more programming languages than he likes, believes Open Source software is a Communist conspiracy, and believes Microsoft is here to save us.

Fundamentalism is scary and bad and should be fought. We’re in war in Iraq and Afghanistan right now to hunt down fundamentalists. We should do the same in our own country. Because, as I said many times before, the real threatening fundamentalists are the ones that are killing the very foundation our country is built on: capitalism. Giving into the freetard fundamentalists is going back to communism. Is that what we want?

I hope he has been declared mentally incompetent and thus ineligible to own a firearm.

Seven Things I Hate About Linux

Linux is great technology. It clearly brings to the table a great number of technological advantages at a more economical price than proprietary technologies. It’s Open Source foundation is great for developers and the licensing quite generous. On the other hand, there are several things that I hate about Linux.

1. Too much energy spent on “evangelizing.” and not development. Yes, talk about the capabilities of Linux. Of course you want to make a pitch to organizations in order to convince them to adopt Linux. At the end of the day though, those who will end up using Linux and staying with Linux will be those for whom the underlying technology proves to be superior.

2. Piecemeal documentation. Yes there are sites like the Linux Documentation Project. Yes you can use Google to see if Linux supports the Acme12345XT Motherboard. But with the exception of Redhat and SuSE’s HCLs, it is difficult to find comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date information on hardware compatibility in an easy to navigate format.

3.  Mediochre GUIs. Not that GNOME or KDE are bad by any means, but when compared to Apple’s Aqua interface, its like viewing a paint-by-numbers  next to a Rembrandt. There is little polish to the interfaces of either. GNOME, as Linus Torvalds himself has said, makes the assumption the user is dumb. KDE has the appearance of a interface that has been cobbled together and lacks any sense of unity. When I first install a distribution, the first thing I do is tweak KDE to something I can tolerate looking at for an extended period of time.

4. Tries to fill too many niches. Whether it is desktop Linux, embedded Linux, server Linux, real-time Linux, or whatever Linux we are talking about, the Linux community has tries to shove Linux in anything with a hole. In trying to fill every conceivable niche, Linux has become a jack of all trades, master of none.

5. Asinine release schedules. Whether it is releasing version 2.3.1 of a distribution a month after the 2.3.0 version, or waiting three years between releases, I always hated this aspect of Linux. At least with Microsoft and Apple, there was an appreciable amount of time between major releases. Six months between Ubuntu or Fedora releases is dumb.

6. Richard Stallman. The Linux community largely ignores him, but they need to denounce him and all of the Stallmanites who have taken up residence in the community. He is unwilling to work with vendors except on his terms and he has totally mischaracterized Trusted Computing. The Linux Community needs to tell him to have a cup of shut the hell up.

7. Poor quality control versus BSD. OpenBSD in particular. With OpenBSD only having two remote exploits in a default install in ten years, this should be something Linux developers are aiming for. Don’t rush out a kernel update just to include some shiny new feature that less than ten percent of the community will use. Sure, Real Time Linux would be great, but if the code is buggy, that just means you can be owned in Real Time.

iPhone’s ‘root’ problem

Evidently, the iPhone runs all of its applications as root. Now for those of you who have never used Linux, Mac OS X, or another UNIX operating system, let me explain to you what root is.

As a root user, you have access to all files on a given system and can perform read, write, and execute on those files. This capability is a two edged sword, as root access also opens your system up to attack. A cracker who wishes to harm your system generally covets root access, as non-privileged  users generally have more restrictive permissions.

Generally, it takes an software-based exploit to successfully achieve privilege escalation. Not so with the iPhone. With the iPhone running as root by default, the door is already open. Were the iPhone to suffer an infection from a worm or virus, root privileges would allow it to spread unencumbered to other mobile devices and to other systems through email. Worse than that, the iPhone could be used to steal personal data or spy on unwitting users, causing general mayhem.

Hopefully Apple will close this gaping security hole before the liability is exploited. If not, Apple may be betting the farm on a device that is egregiously insecure.

High Ho, High Ho, Off to Bankruptcy Court for SCO!

Beautiful news.

But let me temper my glee a little bit. Darl McBride clearly misled his employees and investors into thinking SCO had a chance in court against Novell and IBM. These people were loyal to him and were more than willing to put their livelihoods into his hands. All that they wanted, I am sure, was to produce quality software and reap the fruits of their labors.

Novell has an opportunity to show its generosity by inviting the best of SCO’s software development team, whatever remains of it, to come aboard. Red Hat would also be well served in showing some magnanimity. The responsibility of SCO’s financial ruin rests on McBride’s shoulders. He pursued his quixotic campaign against Linux so its nasty end, but what many forget is that McBride wasn’t just going after Linux. He threatened Apple. BSD. McBride even had the chutzpah to threaten Microsoft.

At the time, McBride could do nothing more than congratulate himself for his scheme of selling snake oil UNIX licenses to Linux users for $199 a pop for workstations and $699 for servers. Now he is probably busy looking for cardboard boxes to pack up his office with. Surely SCOs boardmembers have not taken the Chapter 11 filing laying down…

Darl McBride, Go to Hell

This is the photo of a man in denial. If the board members at SCO have any sense, which I doubt, because they allowed this buffoon to call himself a CEO while growing the company only through the threat of lawsuits, they will can his ass fast.

Dear Darl,

You lost. SCO should reorganize as a fast food chain or a used car dealership ASAP. Even then someone would be a moron to buy anything called stock from you. Nyah, nyah!

Sincerely,

The Linux and computing community in general.

Rebuilding with Windows 98

I spent two days last week rebuilding several machines down at the high school with Windows 98 and installing Office 2000 on them afterwards. This project has so far led me to several observations:

•  Windows 98, when stripped down to the bare essentials, can run extremely fast. How fast? I can cold boot one of the rebuilt machines in 15 seconds or less. That is without even messing with the configuration files.
• Despite all the extravagant features of newer office suites, they suck. Office 2000 loads in three seconds or less on 64 MB of RAM.
• FAT32 sucks. Large disk support meant something different in 1999 than it does today.
• A 550 Mhz Pentium III is a terrible thing to waste on Windows 98…
• These machines would be ideal Windows Eiger candidates

Why Windows 98 Matters Even Though It Shouldn’t

Although this is only my second week as an intern for the school system, I have already made several observations regarding the infrastructure behind the computer systems as well as the deployment of the same. Some of these observations I will keep to myself, as they concern best practices and I am not at liberty to publicly advertise any information about systems that will result in a security compromise of any kind.

With that said, I will make some remarks regarding my observation regarding the continued deployment of Windows 98 on many of the systems in the district. As support for Windows 98 ended on July 11, 2006, relying on this operating system for production systems has it’s drawbacks.

Why not upgrade to Windows 2000?

Windows 2000, officially known as NT 5.0, was intended for deployment in the enterprise environment. It was originally hoped that Windows Millennium  edition would serve as an able successor to 98 for the average user. Unfortunately, Millennium was 98-improved-worse and the costs of Windows 2000 often prohibitive for mass deployment by small school districts like the one I work for. The result was a reliance upon an operating system (Windows 98) that continued even after the support cycle was terminated.

Windows XP was meant to fill the enterprise, home, and educational markets and did so quite well.  Unfortunately, a lot of systems deployed by school districts could not support XP. Forced to rely on Windows 98, it was a matter of time before the other foot dropped.

Finding software that still runs on Windows 98 is becoming increasingly difficult. Internet Explorer 7, the most recent version of Microsoft’s flagship web browser will only run on Windows XP SP2 and above. Office XP was the last version of Office to support Windows 98. Without applications that support it, Windows 98 is becoming quickly obsolete. Yet we are servicing machines that short of resurrecting them of Linux boxes, have no future beyond Windows 98.

Ordering replacement hardware components for these machines is becoming an issue as well. Last week I replaced an old NIC in a Win 9x box. When I stopped at our local supplier to pick up the new NIC, I happened to read the system requirements for this card to work.

Windows 2000 SP4 and up.

Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.

So what did we end up doing? We cannibalized a machine for parts and Googled for the driver. We lucked out and found a working NIC and the driver. It saved the district some money on a NIC, but what will happen when we can no longer cannibalize parts from other machines?

There are very few attractive solutions to this problem. Sure, the district can spend money on brand new PC’s that are preloaded with Windows Vista. Then we have no guarantees  that we won’t run into the same problems with software and hardware compatibility. The only difference this time is that it would be a forwards compatibility issue.

We could standardize on Windows XP Professional SP2/SP3 and hope

1) SP3 does not break apps in quantity like SP2
2) SP3 is not the end of the line for XP Pro after our investment.

We could also refurbish our current hardware with Linux and pretend that the learning curve and the lack of some niche applications for the educational market for Linux are non-issues.

Despite the technological advantages of Linux and the ability to deploy an operating system that still supports Pentium II and low-clock speed Pentium III machines, this is not an option. The number of calls we would get when a user tried to do something that required root access to do and the obligatory explanation of why we “can’t just give out the root password” alone makes this unfeasible.

The final option, despite the expense, would in the end be most satisfactory:

Buy a bunch of damn Macs.