Posts by Leszek KENSBOK

Who is funding Psystar?

By raving angry loony Posted Monday 28th September 2009 20:01 GMT

I'm still curious as to who is funding Psystar.

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Well, it is pretty clear who's dunnit - the Chinese.

Think. If I were a chinese manufacturer, who is possibly treated like sh1t by the Big Fruit, I'd do just about everything to get my goods delivered to the market on my own terms. Why not start in Florida? No old Bohston there, no new Siliconians, no Redmondites, no Dell hatters, no IBM suits. Just a clean slate, tabula rasa.

You jut need to chose a psychic, err, "lucky psystar" as the name, throw out "lucky", clobber together a website (all your bases, etc.), and off it goes.

It's a shame though that they do not ship Linux and/or BSD pre-installed, along with the fruity mess.

BTW: I strongly suspect the Psystar hardware is of decent, probably even high quality. Any other than that would be suicidal.

Go, Psystar, go!

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@ Nathan Williams

Nathan, you said:

Bonus: click the start button the type "run" in the search box and hit enter. Voila! A run box! How fascinating!

Now for my commentary:

Nice to see you sweaty, excited and (obviously) very happy over a GUI of NT6.1. It's fine you can use it. Now try your way under NT4.x, and NT5.x (Win2k, WinXP, Server2003), and NT6.0 (aka Vista).

Unfortunately, what you do advocate here, is a violation of consistent behavior of the said GUI across an OS named 'Windows'. You understand now? Not?

Might be, MS made you 'just love' its shenanigans, changes introduced for change sake, wildly varying menu dialogues and paths, and constant push for re-learning of basic administrative tasks.

Yet it is of no apparent value to the user when a GUI 'just changes'. The (l)user will not be faster--(s)he will have to slow down in order to learn a new trick. Which, BTW, won't work with any other system of the same pedigree. This makes unnecessary work for users as well as support staff.

And no, no new trick is a remedy for a new trick being pushed on us by inconsiderate designers.

I opt for consistency in design, because it saves work, promotes clarity, and might be fun for those who actually work with desktop computers.

For now, NT6.1 looks like usability fail. The ugly bits are deeply hidden, however, so there will be many lusers shouting loudly and proudly how they like it.

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Give me freedom, or give me death.

SUSE near demise is no big surprise - pathetic zig-zagging around the GUI, non-upgradeable installations (you usually cannot fire up the CLI and hope to heave your system version number), monies from The Sweating Ape, horrid inconsistencies within a release, dropping support to legacy systems in month's rhythm, the story goes on...

As an old SUSEr of 5-er pedigree, I went to Debian some three years ago, and never looked back.

The 9-er release was the last stable one. 10.0 was sort of interesting. Afterwards, things went rapidly south, and I decided to not bother myself with SUSE any more.

Go Fedora, or go Debian. Great, working distros of quality and technical beauty. Ask Mark Shuttleworth about his choice.

Great KDE on both, Debian and Fedora. Gnome lovers can use them too, of course, just as smoothly as KDE lovers.

This is not the case with SUSE. Forget it, it is not worth to waste your time on a poor 'system'.

@ Ben

Posted Sunday 1st February 2009 12:39 GMT

"The same argument is continually put forward wherever there are "safety" issues... whether it was the first proposals (for hideously expensive) car safety testing, pharmaceutical testing, and the list can just go on and on."

Ben,

in the realm of economics you lack knowledge.

The first words of your comment show it clearly, thereafter things get even more confused. I will explain it to you. Let's take cars, your subject of choice.

After some six (indeed four) decades of compulsory and mind-bogglingly unnecessary testing of automobiles we have got product which are aptly, neatly and stealthily streamlined into the governmental laws and regulations. The car as we knew it does not exist any more. It evolved.

Mind it, Ben: our cars are now made not to suit our needs, not at all. They are produced to fit into governmental idiosyncrasy to blackmail the producers into manufacturing of cars 'for the masses', a kind of collective volks-wagen for the unwashed, who yearn to be protected, cared for, and otherwise spoon-fed the wisdom they lack.

For customers like you, Ben.

Cars are double as heavy now as they used to be only decades ago. Jump-lifting a Mini with four strong hands? Try it today. Have a look how confined they are - inside. I still remember how roomy and nimble Sir Alec's car one was. Today--be it Audi, Honda or BMW--they are big on the outside only. All looks and no function. Or, heavily hampered function. Pun intended.

I'd prefer government would retract from the relation of producer and consumer. A cobbler does not need be regulated how shoes be made. Those which are obviously unsuitable for the purpose won't sell. Others will first sell poorly, then not at all. Same with cars, socks, homes. Yes, homes, too. We are well informed--even if a building does not attach to a regulation or two it still might suit my needs, or yours. It might suit my needs best precisely because it was constructed out of the envelope.

We are well informed today--if you so desire, make it mandatory for the manufacturers to publish how does their product fit into Big Brother's funny ideas, but let me make the decision.

Do not castrate the inventor because of a folie-du jour, which is en vogue today amongst the law-making bunch in the capital city. And never try to emasculate my decision-making powers.

But, exactly this is happening today.

We have not the problem of unfit producers turning out unwanted goods. We never had the problem here. This was constantly the case in the communist block, but not in the West. There is no problem with the demand, either. Set the price right, and you will see. Tax the constituency into servitude, and they will cry for subsided goods for themselves, i.e. for cheap and abundant credit lines.

Once the money can be had easily, the public will spend it on virtually anything. It won't matter if the product is long-living, if it suits their need well, or if it is at all necessary. The relationship consumer-producer has been abolished. Regulations has been produced, they were.

Enough about industrial goods.

Do not even get me started on food, or medicine, or whatever has to do with taste, health, or life. One man's meat is another man's poison--ponder these words.

Google "Frederic Bastiat", Ben. Read "The Law". An hour well spent, I assure you.

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@ J (Posted Thursday 13th November 2008 23:09 GMT)

As a fellow EASLer I have to agree on the shift in attention which happens when you learn the English language less and less, and apply it more and more in your daily routine.

When I studied it, and then taught it to others, I lived the grammatical rules almost sub-conciously. The experience of gaining a new skill was still fresh, the implementation was fun, and the repetition an instant gratification for the hard worker, i.e. me. Yes, I _am_ as selfish as that.

Diplomas and certificates aside, one cannot work as a teacher all his long life. So I moved on from academia to a daily use of English under conditions of professional work in a knowledge field not directly related to linguistics. Where a language is not an end in itself, neither its study, nor its honing.

Dear J, that is where the pesky uncertainities started to creep in. The flow of thinking already well advanced, the need of expression and explaination of the current step imminent, the attention span stretched to comprise the whole process--not a mere moment of it--here is why occasionally the weight of a particular reasoning step dwindles, the speaker/writer jumps to the "more important" conclusions, neglecting the proper language in the course of events.

It is alwas "just for now", but it alwas repeats itself ad nauseam.

This is how I caught myself making mistakes Britishers do--and correcting them the very way they do (we do). The answer is more study, not abolishments of letters. Never mind the loony prof and his whacky suggestion; apostrophes are part of our language, they are here to be used by those inclined to write in order to be understood.

When I see a strange use of them IRL I just go to the patron, explain, and leave... not without a frequent smile, praise, or occasional gift. Yes, there is such thing as a free meal! At least if you are ready to talk in person to the guys in charge of the premisses where the apostrophes (or English grammar, generally) suffer neglect and misuse, e.g. small restaurants in Italy, France or those little Swiss resorts, greengrocer's shops in Spain, wurstchenbude in Germany, aso.

You won't believe how many nice encounters and small friendships ensued in the course of my little quest for clean language. Speaking to real users of everyday English is more fun to boot, much more than academic lecturing given to a bunch of silly yoofs. Travelling in Europe needn't be boring exercise devoid of fine language - and humour.

To Reg readers and J the commenter:

Thumbs up 'cause we both use English as a means of communication. That's what it's for.

@JonB, AC

> Knowl. At least the spelling would be close to correct.

That would be NOWL.

Just pronouce it slowly, loudly and distinctly.

Google uses short words (mail, maps, news, mail) wherever possible (take notice: NOT email, but mail); consequently they'd rather use nowl instead of knowl. IANAG, and neither are you, so this discussion is academic in every respect.

> images.google.com

I wonder why they didn't name this subdomain "pics" - that's the word for photographs and sundry imagery on the intertubes.

Anyway, using subdomains under their company name is both simple and clever. It lets them overcome every case of tricky domain squatting. Even better when they own "google" under all TLDs (which they now do).

> advertizing

A fine-grained tuning of Opera renders all websites ad-free. This is spam-free to those who are alergic to ads. Do not use Opera? Get an html-caching proxy, other browser + some extension(s), or a decent hosts file for your system, or, or, or. There are dozens of technical means to kill all that distracts you from reading.

I do find Knol pretty interesting, especially if it is used like a library full of books, short stories and analytical literature. This is no Wikipedia; make no assumptions about it. Instead of elaborate search for an item of information I'd rather focus on a topic, and dive in.

Thumbs up to Google.

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@@AppleTards All Have Windows Penis Envy... here's looking at you

The answer to the uneasy gentleman going by name of Anonymous Coward, who does not grok "this whole Kool Aid drinking craze", is quite straightforward.

Some thirty years ago there was a sect--now we can even call them a "dangerous cult"--in Venezuela who, at the word of their leader, poisoned itself away. Completely. Body count was two thousand or some such.

They solved poison into a cauldron of Cool Aid. Now you know what happens with a bunch of thirsty cultists if the RDF around them is strong enough. Other cults drink less Kool Aid, obviously, because they are still around. Some are even growing in volume.

You see that "life does not go better with Coca-Cola" if it is not accompanied by a simultaneous RDF. Indeed, no classic Coke here will my most distinguished, Anonymous help.

The news is almost too good.

Indeed, I had to read it several times in extenso to fully grasp not only what has been decided by the German Supreme Court of Justice but also the implications of this court ruling.

If Germans hate something profoundly, this might be uncertainity. There must have been a lot of hate on the side of the judges, concerning many legal uncertainities pertaining to general IT, so they made a remarkably clear, direct, and comprehensive ruling. A few political commentators cannot recall a ruling this revolutionary since the post-war constitution has been adopted in Germany (1949).

Adhering to the aforementioned Constitution (or Grundgesetz), the judges defined a whole new class of citizens' rights. State institutions of every walk of bureaucratic life has been slammed with the necessity of implementation of these newly defined people's freedoms into their practice. A complete law (Gesetz) on the modus operandi of state police, barely two years old, has been declared unconstitutional and thus nullified by the supreme court.

It seems that the federal government will have to do a lot of homework reviewing the laws and regulations, and so will have each of the 16 province governments, too. The whole shebang is nothing short of revolutionary. It is even conceivable that spammers and crackers will be hit by it due to the fact that they seek to compromise the "informational integrity" of people's communication and data processing devices which is now verboten, and put under penalty.

Personally, I do not care that much about every minute detail of what exactly which state institution will - or won't - be allowed to do due to the new supreme court ruling. However, if the local Interweb spammers (bot hosts) will face jail, or at least compulsory cancellation of their broadband accounts, then the ruling's will undoubtedly have a strong positive effect on the general IT culture in Germany.

The security of data interchange is already up, and rising. The Germans are topped in the number of new, secure Linux installations probably only by the Polish. Due to the said court ruling the awareness of securely sound technologies could put the Germans into the top position in Europe, which is not bad at all.

However, I would abstain from speculating about other countries' experiences with their legislative bodies. That a court of justice defines citizens' freedoms, even broadens them considerably, is pretty much unique. Don't even try to understand it - this is a German specialty. You will have to move your MPs, congressmen, or members of whatever legislative body it might be to do the job. Parliamentary discussion might be a better tool to shape the future law then a court's ruling, which merely initiates the lawmaking procedure.

The initiative is ours. Let us get a strong support for security measures from the corresponding law, and augment our freedoms in a due course.

@Matt

> So, I used this tool, too. What I found today was that it was beta.

Well, Secunia Personal Software Inspector is not quite beta any more. What I found on their website (http://secunia.com) today was a release candidate one.

You have a case though IRT paid consulting services for a third party. However, Secunia denies you in their License Agreement, to which you consented, the right to use the PSI-tool commercially. Therefore, sticking to their rules, you won't run into problems with taking resposibility for a botched tool operation on your customer's PC.

The use of PSI on your private PC is free, which I consider fair enough - even if the tool were in beta status, and not in release candidate status, which it is.

BTW, please go FreeBSD - or maybe even OpenBSD - if you'd like to use a system which is not only secure, but also easy to maintain. All the whining about poor security is mostly confined to systems which are by design hard to maintain.

Once again the "big security question" boils down to the saying "Thank you, Bill". The trailing words "for the crap" are yours to say.