Weekend Grab Bag

Some of you might have been expecting the third and final piece in my Linux review today but, alas, you are destined to be disappointed. Last week my father had a mild stroke and that has kept myself and the rest of my family fairly busy. As such I haven’t had a chance to try and network my two Macs to my new Linux box and thus don’t have much to include in my third review. So, I am moving on to plan B.

Today is the Friday Grab Bag of Random Amusing Crap. There have been a couple funny things in the tech news lately that I wanted to hit on plus there are a few other tidbits of information that deserve a few seconds in the lime light. And of course there will be my witty banter and thoughtful commentary so, let’s get to it.

It would be sad if it wasn’t so funny . . .

First up on the list has to be Sony. In an effort to compete with the iPod, has decided to release this amazing product the next, next, final, we really aren’t kidding this time, iPod killer.. They are going to call it “the Bean”. I wish I was kidding, I really do. But I am not. And that is extra scary.

The bean. They are calling it the bean. Isn’t that just pitiful? When I read the article for the first time all I could think of was this. Who knows, maybe they will get Rowan Atkinson to endorse it. He can use it as one of his devices if they ever make a “Johnny English 2”.

Every time I write one of these articles I swear to myself that it will be the last. But every time I think that the competition couldn’t make anything worse they go and surprise me. They are simply going to have to stop making these crappy products because I am running out of jokes.

Trample me if you’ve heard this one before

This past Tuesday I happened to be driving through Richmond Virginia on my way to work. And as I was listening to the morning news I heard that the Henrico county iBook sale was going on today. And oh what a glorious mess it was. Here are some of the highlights from the broadcasts. People started to arrive at 5:00 a.m. for the 9:00 a.m. sale. Traffic was insane because no one was directing the incoming cars. Eventually event coordinators decided to stop anymore cars from parking so as not to create a problem. Good idea, too bad it was only 2 hours too late. By the time they shut the gates there were 5,000 people waiting in line for 1,000 iBooks. Hum. . .what could go wrong? Later on the evening news I watched some of the interviews with the victims. Apparently when the sale finally started they just threw open the doors and said “come on in everybody!” Several people were trampled, a stroller was destroyed, half dozen people tripped and got smashed up pretty good. All in all it was a pretty crazy, especially considering that these same people who were fighting to the death for a laptop also voted against buying anymore iBooks for their students.

Trying to keep Windows virus free, damn that tension headache is back

There is so much craziness where to begin? I could start with the US Patent copyright office and how they are thinking about using IE exclusively for copyright registration. There are just so many things wrong with that on so many different levels. I tell you what, I will leave that one for the comments section. Mr. Howard can battle Beeblebrox to the death over this one.

More on the virus issue though. It appears that several major news networks had their computers infected recently with the latest slew of viruses and bots. Apparently Microsoft’s ‘Plug and Play’ bug was a wee bit more serious than originally thought. Don’t forget the ZOTOB virus, which has just recently gotten lots of coverage, and let us not fail to mention the alerts from Redmond about the new critical vulnerabilities in Windows. All in all it must really be stressful on the administrators who have to try and protect/update any computers running Windows 2000.

But the best Microsoft security issue by far has to be the thing with Monad. Everyone remember this? Several hackers produced a proof of concept virus two weeks ago (before MS announced that they had cut Monad from Vista) explaining how vulnerabilities in Monad could be exploited. And as funny as that was it got better. Shortly after that article I found a rebuttal that attempted to explain away the issue. The author’s main points seemed to be something like:

1. Monad is cut anyway so it doesn’t matter.
2. Even if it wasn’t cut they aren’t real viruses they were just proofs.
3. And the proofs weren’t really about viruses they were about scripts.
4. And if you can’t tell the difference between a script and a virus you are stupid.

Now, all of what this chump says might be true, but that isn’t the point. The point is that Vista isn’t even done yet and the hackers have already figured out how to exploit a vulnerability in it. How in the hell can you say anything positive about security after that? I mean Vista has been released to a small group of developers and already hackers are openly planning on the internet how they could break into your not-yet-released operating system. Doesn’t that sound a little odd to anyone?

One last joke

I will send you into the weekend with this joke I found, I thought it was great myself.

God was looking down on earth one day and decided that things
were not going to get better, in fact they were getting worse
every day. He said to himself thet it is time to start over
again with a new batch who might be able to do better than this
bunch of humans are doing.

Bill Gates went back to his people and told them that he had
some good news and some great news. First the good news is that
our belief in God is founded, I had a talk with him this morning
and the really great news is that we will be able to stop
releasing security patches for WindowsXP in less than a month!