Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, November 17, 2003

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Windows-to-Linux roadmap: A roadmap for developers making the transition to Linux: "You're moving from Windows to Linux. You've decided you want the stability, flexibility, and cost savings of Linux, but you have many questions in your head. Isn't Linux like Unix? Isn't Unix hard? Where do you begin to make sense of all of this? Is there a map you can follow?"

Money-making Windows -- Comment()
Microsoft's money machine revealed: "The grand-daddy of them all was the unit responsible for Windows. It had costs of just $545 million but generated a profit of $2264 million, a staggering 415.4% profit on the money they put into it."

Christmas will be hot spam season -- Comment()
The number spam e-mail messages rises again. Fortunately, almost none get through, thanks to server-side filtering and the spam filter of Mail of Mac OS X. Two weeks ago I received about 70 spam messages in a week, today I have 184 spam messages in the spam folder (received within a week). I would guess that Christmas will be the busiest spam season ever.

How many source lines of code (SLOC) in Red Hat 9, Debian, Mac OS X 10.3, Windows Longhorn? -- Comment()
I'm thinking about the complexity of current state-of-the-art operating systems. However, I have been unable to find estimates for the current systems. Red Hat 7.1 was estimated to be at 30 million SLOC, and Windows XP at 40 million. What about Red Hat 9, Debian, Mac OS X 10.3, Windows Longhorn?

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Cracking the hacker underground: "Undercover groups who infiltrate underground hacker networks do increasingly crucial work for net security firms." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

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Mail.app and AppleScript: "Last month, I posted a link to some free software for Mail.app OS X that Jonathan Nathan is offering under the GPL. This code was designed to allow a user of Mail.app to move a message to a folder with a single keystroke. [...] Apple has released Panther, and Aaron has released a script that does the same thing within Panther." [Lessig Blog]

The script by Aaron works even with hierarchical mail folders, provided they are written using the "folder/subfolder" notation. I made several scripts for moving messages to often-used folders, and tested them a bit. Nice!

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Norman Cousins: "Laughter is inner jogging." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

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Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex on-line: "Larry Niven's story Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex is now available online, with permission of the author. This is painfully amusing in a number of ways. Why? Because this story was one of the first to be caught in the complex web of sharing versus copyright..." [Teal Sunglasses]

The PayPal scam -- Comment()
My spam folder contained (once again) a mail claiming to come from PayPal. Actuallly, the mail contained just an image with a www link. This was easy to spot on Mac OS X, because the text quality was substandard (like on Windows). Here is a portion of the image:

Did you click on the link by any chance?

Top 500 supercomputers: Apple G5 supercluster in third place -- Comment()
The TOP500 List for November 2003 is available. This list will be announced this week at the SC2003 conference at Phoenix, Arizona. The Apple G5 dual supercluster at Virginia Tech (see some background) is thus officially the third fastest supercomputer on Earth. The listed Rmax speed is 10.3 teraflop/s. And who is listed as the vendor? "Self-made." (The next self-made system is in position 63.)

Update: Here is the press release on the top-500 list.

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In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people points to It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere, by Jennifer Howard: "The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. The cult of media celebrity hasn't been broken by the Internet's democratic tendencies; it's just found new enabling technology." [via Doc Searls Weblog]

Making equations on Mac OS X -- Comment()
Equation Service 1.0 generates mathematical equations for Keynote and other similar programs on Mac OS X. Thanks for Doug Rowland for writing the software. The package uses pdflatex for typesetting, so you need to have TeX installed. Here is a sample: