The Desktop Fishbowl
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Thursday, 23 May 2002

The Register reports that there are more problems with biometrics than just fake gelatin fingerprints. German magazine c't has tested consumer face-recognition, fingerprint-reading and iris-scanning devices, concluding that most of them can be fooled pretty easily. 4:42:02 PM

While at work, I use Windows 2000. This it not by any choice of mine, it's based entirely on a choice made by IBM several years ago to never finish fully functional Linux version of their Java IDE, VisualAge for Java. (The replacement for VAJ, Websphere Studio Application Developer, is available for Linux. We still have a lot of projects tied up in VAJ, but once we stop working on them, it's bye-bye Windows.) Today, I got around to doing what all computer users, regardless of OS, must do. I had to install the latest set of patches. When I got to WindowsUpdate, I discovered that there were three "critical updates" that I had to download, or be faced with ruin and damnation. The problem was, you couldn't install all three. You had to download one, install it, reboot, download the next, install it, reboot, download the third, install it, and reboot. I remember when I first installed Win2k and was amazed how few times I had to reboot to set the machine up. What happened to those good old days? Even if I were to accept that I had to reboot, I still take offence at this disgusting waste of my valuable time. One of the whole points of computers was supposed to be the automation of repetitive tasks. There is absolutely no technical reason why I should not be able to download all the updates I want, and then hit a button to tell Windows to just keep rebooting itself until they're all installed. No technical reason, but a significant practical one - Microsoft just don't give a shit that my time, and my employer's time, has to be used up playing nurse-maid to their incompetent update system. Oh, and while writing this, I discover that I have to reinstall the first update I downloaded. It reappeared in the list of critical updates, presumably because it was trashed by one of the other patches. The software should have known this was going to happen, and told me to install them in the other order. The computer should be serving me. Not vice versa. 2:51:45 PM

Jamie Zawinsky does fridge-magnet poetry. ...since a day without dada is like fish ventricle capacitor 1:27:14 PM