OSNews points to an article that tells you how to Boot Fedora Linux Faster. "Everyone wants a quick boot time, from the beginner user to the advanced user, this is a issue that bothers us all. As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds."
You can never have too much RAM, too slim a laptop or too fast a boot-up sequence!
7:42:22 PM comment []
At Shedding Some Light, Rick Schummer blogs Godspeed Discovery! "The launch of Discovery this morning was spectacular as expected taking 7 new heroes back to space. This is the second time Discovery has healed the space program as it followed Challenger into space back in 1988." Godspeed, indeed.
6:09:26 PM comment []
OSNews points to an eWeek article, Microsoft Lowers the Boom on Illegal Windows Copies. "Microsoft is tightening the noose for those people running illegal or pirated copies of its Windows XP/2000 software on their systems. Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory for users of this Windows software to certify that their software is a genuine and legal copy before they will be able to receive any updates except security patches."
This just has Bad Idea written all over it. Copy Protection (and this is just a delayed form of Copy Protection) inevitably takes out some innocent bystanders while the really serious pirates work around it. (The first PC software I bought was CopyIIPC so that I could make backup copies of the company's Lotus 1-2-3 key disks, since the employees were always destroying disks.) Some of Microsoft's customers will end up in a situation where the "Windows Genuine Advantage" package, in an effort to enhance their experience, stops them from doing what they legitimately need to get done. More collateral damage. We've all ended up in a situation where Windows demands "Office CD 2" or that you type in some product key thats back in the office a thousand miles away. From the article:
Microsoft has also made changes to streamline the process, including no longer requiring customers to enter their product key since the ActiveX control used to validate their software can now automatically determine whether they have a genuine Windows product.
(InfoWorld) - "Netscape has released a series of fixes for serious security flaws in its browser and, incredibly, listed a further 10 that it has yet to patch."
Computerworld News notes Microsoft could face trademark fight over Vista OS name. "John Wall, CEO of Vista Inc., said his company is "considering all of its options" for a potential lawsuit against Microsoft, which last week announced that the next version of its operating system would be called Windows Vista."
Not surprising that the name was already taken. We'll have to see if Microsoft can argue their trademark is sufficiently different.
12:28:18 PM comment []
MySQL is up to 4.1.13 to avoid a buffer overrun in the zlib library. Consider updating, especially if you're exposing your db directly to the internet.
12:26:19 PM comment []
The ever-snarky Andrew Orlowski points out in the Register that Microsoft is shipping an anti-spyware tool (they bought, not developed) based on the abandoned, unsupported and generally disrespected Visual Basic 6.0. Perhaps they should consider rewriting it in Visual FoxPro...
12:08:43 PM comment []
