Rubénerd!

Via this article on the American ZDNet. A shame, because I really was desperate to see why I'd be using Chrome OS in three years.

I'd never be caught making a misteak like that.

NAB's payments processing meltdowns were a "wake-up call" for the financial services community, [...] said CGU Insurance Australia chief information officer (CIO) Ian Frew. ~ ZDNet Australia

Of all industries, financial services should be at the forefront of security and privacy of information, and if they're not they should be brutally beaten into submission until they are. I'm sorry, but this situation is abhorrent.

In a broader sense, why do businesses refuse to learn from others and only [promise to] implement security measures only after they've been bitten themselves? I'd hazard a guess that middle managers don't take it seriously until it's a PR issue. Heh, Sony.

Checking out ZDNet I was redirected to an article by Ed Bott who dismisses many of the woes with Windows as being the fault of its antitrust lawsuit. Yeah, damn those big government people trying to break up an unethical corporation!

It was 10 years ago this week that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his final judgment in U.S. versus Microsoft. Two months earlier, after almost two years of legal proceedings, the judge found that Microsoft had illegally abused its monopoly in the operating system market [..]

So, ten years later, with the gift of hindsight, how did that settlement work out? [..] Here are four significant developments that affect all PC users and in my opinion can be traced directly back to the antitrust case and its settlement.

Ed then proceeded to list a bunch of reasons why Windows is still terrible to use, but provided only tenuous reasons why they have anything to do with DOJ court decisions. Had he not mentioned the word "antitrust" in his report, it could have just been passed off as a critique of Windows in general, me thinks.

Crapware isn't the fault of the free market! Oh, wait

While Ed delights in thanking the judge for all the crapware installed on Windows machines, he fails to point out the scourge existed long before Microsoft was deemed to have abused their monopoly, and he doesn't touch on the primary reason.

Unlike Apple which sells a cohesive and markably different product (which you may or may not like), hardware manufacturers were all selling the same Wintel whatnot and needed a way to differentiate themselves. Being clueless, this meant they bundled their own awful CD burning software, media players and rheems of nasty trialware, then replaced a base Windows install CD with a restore disc that meant you couldn't even wipe it clean with a fresh install. Of course, such manufacturers also get nice kickbacks from those software vendors for inconveniencing their users like that.

Pointless nostalgia moment: I remember my otherwise beautiful little Sony VAIO PictureBook machine in 2000 had so much crapware I saved half it's drive space by buying a retail copy of Windows 2000 and wiping Me and its crapware off it entirely. I couldn't run Red Hat Linux on it because it didn't detect the then-revolutionary webcam. Anyway I wouldn't touch a Sony product with a ten-foot pole now, not least because of their rootkit shenanigans and from this previous crapware experience.

QED sounds like an ocean liner

It's similar to what we're seeing with Android handset makers now; HTC's UI and bundled software are different from other Android makers simply so people are given motivation to buy their products over others. The result is a level of imposed fragmentation that simply doesn't exist on a products made by Apple (or the late Palm), nor the chosen fragmentation from a true FOSS system such a FreeBSD or your Linus distribution of choce where the users choose exactly what they want and not a third party. But that's for another post!

Anyway I'm just a anxious blogger who gets paid in donated cups of coffee, and Ed Bott has the following humble description added to each of his stories; and judging from some of the titles of his other recent articles you can tell he's not into sensationalism ;).

Remember back when I discussed how since I started using it in 2007 Twitter had allowed me to contact famous people I admire and actually get replies from them? At last count I had Steve Gillmor, JD Lasica, Stephen Fry, John C. Dvorak, Mike Rann, and Alex Lindsay, now I can include Dana Gardner!

For someone with so many (sometimes conflicting) interests, I'm clearly still quite a simple person; one brief chat with someone like Dana is enough to make my evening :). You can keep your Britney Spears and other Twitter celebs, these people are the real deal.

What we swapped tweets about will be the subject of a future post, specifically Microhoo's ability to undercut Google. Interesting for lots of different reasons.

This is another post that's been sitting in my Drafts folder since the 27th of November 2007. In trying to clean out this backlog I'm finishing and publishing these posts now, even if this particular story is somewhat outdated and I was much cockier back then than I am now! Cheers ^_^

Ed Bott on ZDNet has listed a set of optimisations you can perform to make Windows Vista boot faster. It seems even fewer and fewer people are impressed with this OS, and the fact the inferior experience starts even before it starts is ominous to say the least.

I was in a down mood this afternoon given my mum's latest poor medical test results, so I decided to break loose and post some flamebait!

rubenschade@ -- FreeBSD Flamebait

My 1.3GHz Athlon machine with 256MB of RAM, FreeBSD 6.2 and a fully decked out KDE desktop boots up significantly faster than Vista on every brand new state of the art machine I've tried, and I'd argue I'm just as (if not more) productive on it.

Saying Windows Vista doesn't take as long to boot is like saying that a snail is faster than an amoeba. It's probably true, but it's a pointless statement.

ASIDE: FreeBSD+KDE also boots up almost twice as fast as Debian GNU/Linux+KDE too wink

I was excited that it didn't take too long for someone to reply after all, though I was disappointed by it's crudeness. I was hoping for something more astroturfy!

done@ -- Thank Dog!

The pathetic Linux zealot has arrived.

I thought we'd have to wait longer.. but thank Dog - here he is!

When Linux runs programs people NEED TO WORK is when it will become a mainstream OS.. until then, it's a fun curiosity..

An ad hominum attack, followed by an fundamental mistake a quick glance over at Wikipedia would have prevented? I was all ready to pen my smiley face response but a few generous souls beat me to it.

bmerc@ -- Hey clueless...

If you're gonna trash talk someone for driving a Ford, take the time to make sure they're not actually in a Chevy before you open your yap.

BSD is not Linux. The fact that you don't know this tells me everything I need to know about your knowledge of Linux and OSes in general.

zaine_ridling@ -- I can vouch for that

FreeBSD is amazingly fast. Even on my 5-year old machine, it boots in 12 seconds, twice as fast as any Linux distro I've installed in the past 18 months.

In retrospect it probably wasn't a good idea to post about FreeBSD on a Windows blog, but I reckon it's important to let people know sometimes that a particular piece of software isn't the be-all end-all. Sure Vista can be made to boot faster... but it's still akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or claiming that I'm Bill Kurtis, which isn't true.

To comment on any article or weblog post over on ZDNet you must register and hand over more information than I needed to open a bank account here in Singapore! That aside though, after you've filled in the registration form you scroll down the page and are given a list of checkboxes next to newsletters you want to subscribe to.

As you can see I unchecked every single one, yet every day now I get two Windows ZDNet tech newsletters which are especially useful to a Mac and FreeBSD user such as myself... go figure!

Anyway one of the articles which I received in my inbox was entitled How to run Internet Explorer securely which includes a string of screenshots like this one:

And here I was under the impression that the best way to securely use Internet Explorer was to uninstall it along with Windows and install FreeBSD or Linux with Firefox or Opera! In fact that first point is even the recommendation of US federal authorities:

The Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT which advises the US Government has warned that users should stop using Internet Explorer for surfing the web. The world's most popular browser, it has been described as being riddled with security flaws and is vulnerable against hackers and snoopers.

A number of leading organisations have also backed the move away from Internet Explorer as a recent investigation has shown that criminals can exploit the program to record keystrokes inputted by the users, so that they may steal credit card and other personal information and use the details for their own gain.

Johannes Ulrich, CTO for Sans Internet Security stated that the recently exposed flaws were a wake up call for users to switch to another browser. He continued to say to keep on using Internet Explorer is like playing the lottery.

- adamantean.com

Ruben's on a high, replacing the MadPlayer with Logic Express (limitations, the "zzzzz" problem), the word "blah", Ruben's Review (Bloglines, my favourite weblog feeds, why I don't use a program on my machine), pronouncing ZDNet and how to defeat boredom... sometimes.

Download MP3 ↓ 10:00 minutes, 6.4MiB

You can also stream it and view its Internet Archive page.