By George Ou on
5/16/2008 4:31 PM
My former colleagues Larry Dignan and Christopher Dawson have voiced their concerns about the OLPC foundation's decision to offer a choice between Windows XP or Linux plus Sugar interface on the XO laptop. Both of them point out that it will be Governments and purchasing agencies that will most likely make the decision to go with Windows XP and that children won't have a say in the decision when may instead pick the Linux plus Sugar interface.
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/15/2008 7:00 AM
One day after the Debian Linux project announced a massive flaw where its implementation of OpenSSL key generators only used 15 bits of entropy (32,768 combinations), HD Moore (creator of Metasploit) has released a tool to exploit it. Nate McFeters has a good write up here on this matter.
This means that any asymmetric crypto keys generated between September 2006 and 5/13/2008 a
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/15/2008 12:12 AM
I can't wait until JMJ 2.0 (my son's name is Jarrett Marshall James, aka JMJ 2.0) is old enough for me to sit him down and write his first program. To give him an idea of what it was like "back in Daddy's era", I will give him some completely crippled language that is missing useful features like eval() (yes, I am hung up on dynamic languages), with libraries that are poorly documented (you know, where the "DoRoutine() method is described as, "Does the routine" without explaining what the routine is...), and having to follow someone else's spaghetti code to get anywhere.
(continued)
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/13/2008 12:24 PM
I like to do things right. Sadly, sometimes doing things "right" gets in the way of doing them well, or doing them at all. In my most recent case, I needed to stop trying to set my network up "right", and do it "wrong". Now, instead of looking like an enterprise network like I wanted, it resembles a residential network on steroids. In reality, it actually makes sense... it is founded on residential technology (Verizon FiOS), after all, which just does not support the networking schemes that enterprise networks use. All in all, the question really is, "does it meet our needs?" And in this case, I'll take the 30/5 service for a few hudred dollars and a residential-style networking scheme over 1.5/1.5 and an enterprise-style networking scheme any day of the week.
J.Ja
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/12/2008 11:32 PM
During the last few years, I've found a number of people who are consistently thought provoking through the forums at TechRepublic. George and I discussed a few times the idea that we wanted this site to be able to give a voice to people who might not have a venue. Sure, anyone can get a LiveJournal or WordPress blog somewhere, but that does not mean that it will get read, even if it is worthwhile. In an effort to give a good airing to some of these people, I will, from time-to-time, run a "guest blog" post. Today's guest blogger is Jaqui Greenlees.
(continued)
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/10/2008 11:39 PM
The dirty little secret in information security is that anyone or company using FTP to transfer files is probably violating every security compliance requirement under the sun and most companies are guilty of it. The authentication and payload transmission system in the FTP protocol is completely unencrypted and in the clear. If those authentication credentials are shared by other access controls in the organization, then a lot more than the FTP server is at stake and a sniffed FTP password can lead to a much larger security compromise.
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/10/2008 8:03 PM
It looks like Microsoft's warning that you can't uninstall IE7 after you install Windows XP SP3 may apply conversely as well. If you do a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, the IE7 installer will fail. I'm still trying to see if I can force an IE7 install right now.
Update 9:25PM - Finally got IE7 installed. The first botched installation left some instructions on the desktop to reset some permission on some file and I cut-paste it in to the CMD console. Then I downloaded the installer manually and installed it but it still gave me a failure notice and to reboot. After I rebooted, it appears that IE7 did get installed. Weird.
|
By George Ou on
5/10/2008 4:57 PM
I'm trying to do a fresh install of Microsoft Windows XP and I thought it would be great to upgrade it directly to Windows XP SP3. So I download the network-install version of Windows XP3 (filename WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe) and start installing it and get the disapointing news. It appears that Windows XP Sp3 will not install on any machine that doesn't at least have SP1 installed.
I guess I'll have to see if it's possible to slipstream it in to Windows XP using nLite.
Update 7:00PM - nLite worked well and got the slipstreamed installer working. I did have some Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/10/2008 2:02 AM
I did another guest appearance on Computer America last night with Carey Holzman last night who I met two years ago at DEFCON. Carey's a great guy who does solo shows on Friday nights and I've probably been on the show with him half a dozen times or more. You can hear the podcast here in their archives from the second hour of May 9th 2008.
Here we are pictured below at
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/9/2008 12:23 PM
Over the years, I've periodically touched based with Scott Abel from Spiceworks. I did one of the first reviews of their initial release, and was quite impressed. Scott and I also collaborated on a trio of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about starting a tech company. And I've talked to Scott before about their development process. Toda
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/9/2008 4:39 AM
Congressman John Conyers and Zoe Lofgren have reintroduced a Net Neutrality Bill that prohibits charges for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service" in the name of stopping discrimination. Unfortunately, it stops a lot more than discrimination; it flat out bans tiered pricing for different levels of QoS (Quality of Service) which cripples the Internet under the justification of banning "discrimination". Here's the text of the bill from the first time this bill was introduced that Richard Bennett dug up.
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/8/2008 5:44 PM
According to polls, most of you know by now that over-the-air Analog TV will cease to exist after February 2009. I applied for two coupons for my home and I received them in the mail last week. This week I went out and got my converter box at Circuit City. While the coupon covered $40 of the price, my Zenith DTT900 (pictured above left) cost $60 and the Philips SDV2270/17 antenna (pictured above on the right) cost $20. That meant with taxes, I had to spend $46 to convert my analog TV to a digital TV.
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/6/2008 8:54 PM
I cannot imagine any other IT vendor offering to ship, for free, a server (even pay the shipping & handling both ways!), provide support on it, and let me hold onto it for 60 days. And after all of that, give me a 25% discount if/when I decide to keep it.
Sun is.
(continued)
Read More »
|
By Justin James on
5/5/2008 10:31 PM
I am aware of two open positions for people in Columbia, SC, or who are willing to relocate. One is a junior/mid level Windows system administrator (seems a step up from making user accounts, resetting passwords, etc., but nothing too complex). The other is for a Web designer/developer; the emphasis seems to be on HTML and CSS, not the backend stuff. Let me know (or comment back) if you are interested, and I can get you in touch with the right people. Mind you, I don't know much about these positions, a recruiter friend of mine told me about them, and the positions she reps are usually very good ones (indeed, she landed me into my previous position).
J.Ja
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/5/2008 4:59 PM
720p with the Kodak V1253 from
Read More »
|
By George Ou on
5/4/2008 11:38 PM
A lot of gamers on a budget want to know how to build the cheapest biggest bang per buck gaming PC so here it is. This computer has surprisingly low power consumption with the latest generation NVIDIA 9600GT graphics adapter and Intel dual-core 45nm processor. In fact, I would go as far as saying that this is probably the most energy efficient gaming computer in its performance class with idle power consumption in the 60 watts range and peak power consumption in the low 100 watts range.
This system runs cool and quiet with very respectable frame rates on a 22" or smaller LCD with (1680x1050 resolution). The motherboard has 5 SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 1+0, and 5 capability and it's perfect for storing all your videos. Just add a few more terabyte hard drives and this computer becomes the heart
Read More »
|
|
|