Links from the Gregg Zone!

1) I was sent this link, I feel the need to put in a small disclaimer here; These links are for your information only, if you feel the need to perform any action based on them you do so at your own risk I am not responsible for any damages incurred as a result of that action. Okay enough of that, this first link is how to make fire with water, a chemical reaction that would have pleased me as a teenager, also might have put me in jail. I am often surprised what subjects can be found on the net how to make an atomic bomb would be included in that venue this is not that bad, or maybe worse, due to availability of ingredients. So if you choose to watch this please be responsible. http://www.instructables.com

2) The disclaimer in the last link would also apply here. This is a how to for an entertainment trick on how to play with fire, as in part of an act a fire-eater, or magician would do on stage. Learn how to juggle and impress your friends at your next party; just try not to impress the local fire department as well. http://youtube.com

3) On a little grander scale than just destroying the house and/or neighborhood lets move on to the latest in warfare. I was reading a story on advanced sight for small military robots. Article linked here http://www.networkworld.com an interesting article. As a small aside here the iRobot company listed as being licensed for the landar technology is the same company that makes the Roomba automatic vacuum, just incase you might have a few extra bucks to throw into the stock market. Anyway, this article led me to a link on the latest military technology. This site is put up by the Israeli’s, on international defense technology. Some very scary stuff here, but informative if the subject is your cup of tea. http://www.defense-update.com/

4) Okay we have covered the house, neighborhood, and the country, what is left? How about we take out the entire planet, and do it in the next two days or so. This one has me hoping there will be a show next week. Have you heard about TU24? Probably not, I know it was news to me, I had often heard the question “If there was an asteroid going top hit the Earth would the government tell us about it?” This could be an alarming wake up call to answer that question. I put up a link a while back about the comet Holmes becoming the largest object in our solar system, even larger than the Sun. It seems that was due to a rather newly discovered field of research called a plasma discharge. Sorry it is one of those subjects not listed in my pay-grade description. It appears TU24; an object about the size of the Sears Towers will be missing the planet next week, but will be passing close enough to enter our magnetosphere, if TU24 is a negatively charged object it could trigger a plasma discharge, causing an unknown amount of damage. http://www.tu24.org/The site is one that was put up only to disclose information about TU24, I found the most information in the FAQ section, you need to navigate from there to “The Real Danger from TU24”, the go button takes you to forums, try the “Real Danger” link first.

5) Last up for the week is a link about the former planet Pluto, and the mission to visit our far-out neighbor. Seems the first photos of Pluto are in, not much to look at, but I found the article about the mission a good read. http://www.planetary.org

KDE, not just for Linux anymore?

KDE, on your Windows, on your OS X, on your OpenSolaris... And the intent appears to be the ability run software intended for other OSes, on any of the OSes, in the near future. It sound very ambitious to me, but since most new desktops and workstations being sold today, are now on some flavor of x86 CPU, it sounds more plausible today than it did in January 2006, just before Job showed off the Mac on Intel hardware in his keynote.

I don't see it has being stupid simple in the early days, but we may be able to pick and choose our software by our preferences, rather than our OS some day soon.

IE7 Auto-Rollout, Fact and Fiction

Ars has a good, short, bit about the IE 7 push. It will answer all your questions.

Microsoft's decision to treat IE 7 as a security update, rather than an application update, makes a lot of sense and no matter how you feel about IE 7, it really is more secure and treating it this way allows a lot more people to download and use it, making them more secure. And making US more secure, by logical extension.

Jack

JAVA 1.6 Update 4

Roger's Information Security Blog has a short piece on the new Java update, v4. The real attraction is the links, which centralize information and opinion on it for your convenience.

No one is sure whether or not this update is all that important. In such a circumstance, I tend to install quickly, as if it were important, to err on the side of caution. I guess you should, too.

Jack

IBM Will NOT Open OS/2 Source Code

To have OS/2 released to a development community has been the fond hope of many OS/2 fans and a lot of developers. It's not going to happen. I'm sure it could, but IBM is not going to pay for the legal legwork needed to stay out of patent and copyright hell. There is no reason for them to, in light of their already expensive and extensive committment to Linux and AIX.

Nevertheless; various communities have been trying to get IBM to release OS/2 for years. Now we've had a second answer to a petition asking just that. The answer is a resounding "no".

Jack

AT&T, P2P Filtering, and the Consumer

Now here's an interesting idea; the ISP as content filter. And this after AT&T led an all-out, expenses be damned campaign to add the "safe harbor" clauses to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protected ISPs from just that responsibility.

Before you get too worked up reading this, remember it is just a trial balloon floated to see what happens. Still, it raises more questions than it answers and I'm sure AT&T's motive at this point is to see whether or not this could lead to angry mobs in the streets. Any less of a reaction and this might become real, but the possibilities are still slim.

Jack

ARS Technica Review of KDE 4

KDE 4 debuted this past week. Details are just coming out and, frankly, this looks like the spectacular and powerful desktop Linux has been in need of.

Version 4 has been redone under the hood and in all the visible spots. While not all new, enough of it is that just mentioning it all and tossing in some nice images takes 7 pages in the ARS review. The new version is buggy and not quite feature-complete, though it looks to me worth installing and working with right now. For that reason version 3.5, the current stable release, is still fully supported. I suspect it will take a while for the various distributions that offer KDE to switch over. That's okay.

The review is definitely worth your time. It's pretty well written and will give you a great overview of what is to come. As to whether or not you want to jump into version 4, you'll have to decide that for yourself.

Jack

OnComputers Radio show Podcast 01-20-08

This is the On Computers Radio show podcast for 01-20-08. You can listen live every Sunday from 10AM to 1PM Pacific thats 1PM to 4PM Eastern. Join us for the live show and chat. If you prefer, you can download the same MP3 file here via ftp.

Geek Meet 2008

Geek Meet 2008 MAY be the weekend of April 11-13 2008 in Las Vegas.

We have received the final contracts for the hotel for Geek Meet. However, in the event that we do not fill the 10 rooms we have requested be blocked, the rate will be going up for each night. As of January 19th, we do not have a commitment from you, our listeners, that we will fill 10 rooms. As such, we have not signed the contract yet. If you are planning on coming to Geek Meet, considering coming to Geek Meet, thinking of coming to Geek Meet, you MUST send us an email to geekmeet08@oncomputers.info. If we do not have a firm commitment that we can fill the 10 rooms by next Saturday, January 26th, we will be considering canceling Geek Meet.

OLPC review, by Buzz!

Jack posted this in the news group and I felt there was enough interest. And I assume more read the blog than the newsgroup? (If I'm wrong please let me know in comments). A great, in depth review of the OLPC, One Laptop Per Child machine. But wait! There's more! ;) I was reading a blog about hacking the OLPC, and found a "tutorial" on installing Opera on it. Enjoy!

--MissM

OLPC

Links from the Gregg Zone!

1) Okay, first up for the week something you will not see from me often, some links regarding football. The first is a Youtube link showing an unbelievable play in college football. http://youtube.com The second is an audio of the coach prepping the team on the play http://www.slatev.comI was most impressed with the sportscaster being able to get the calling of the action right. Any way I thought it was interesting, even though I know nothing little about the game.

2) This is a geek thing I ran across basically a clickable cartoon strip for geeks, if everyone has already seen it I apologize it was new to me, thought some of you may have missed it so here it is. http://www.ageeklikeme.com/

3) I have no idea how many of you are familiar with dowsing, this is a favorite subject of mine, but I am usually reluctant to bring it up, when I do I get those funny looks. Well this just seemed to be the time, so here I go. It was several years ago when I ran across this subject, I had off and on heard mention about water witches. One day I decided to look in to it, was surprised to read it is a serious subject; many municipal governments use them, also mineral, oil, and gas companies. When I read about pendulum dowsing, I decided to try it. I expected nothing, thought it was bunk just a lot of hooey. I was surprised when I got results, and I mean immediate results worked first time, every time. While I am still confused about the how and why, not sure about the quality of the answers I get, it is not always correct. Then there is that bit about correctly asking the question, you need to be careful about ambiguities, avoiding those questions that can be interrupted differently. I find that just the fact it works to be completely amazing. This is the best link I have found for a beginner to investigate the subject. Try it for yourself; I think that you to will be surprised, by the fact that it will give you answers to your questions. This link gives you the choice of language, and HTML or PDF http://www.lettertorobin.org/

4) This is for those who used to be so much better than I was with a yoyo; you deserve this now you will know how I felt. I was lucky to get it to come back up the string more than once. Any yoyoist (pardon) types out there should really like this video. He is the best I have seen, ever. http://toocoolvideos.blogspot.coml

5) I just thought I might put up a vacation destination for the Art Bell types out there, the brave ones any way. I found this while looking around for places I might like to relocate to, it is just one of those pipe dreams I occasionally think about, moving to a rural area. Well Southern Colorado; and Northern New Mexico were areas I was looking into. Then I found this I may have to check this area off my list, as it seems I would have to have nerves of steel, or brains of wax to consider moving here. Then again, it may be interesting, trouble is it might be to damn interesting. There are two parts, separate links. Part one: http://www.cyberwest.com Part two: http://www.cyberwest.com

Need a Mac Support Tech? Find a Linux Guru

It seems as if once a person is familiar with the fundamentals of Linux, or any other system that is built on the Unix philosophy (which the Mac OS X is, too) they are half-way or more to being able to work confidently on a Mac from the command line, which is where most corporate IT support work is done.

I'll call Steve Jobs right away and tell him, in case he wants to distance his company from the unwashed masses like me who use Linux.

Jack

A Lesson in User Failure: Investigating the Serial ATA Connector

Ryan Smith over at Anandtech has an interesting take on SATA connectors, with which I have to agree, though I had not thought of it that way until I saw this article. The piece is short, despite being posted on 3 pages, and very readable. I think you will find it food for thought.

Jack

Streaming radio causes new threat in Winamp

I know a lot of you are Winamp users. My wife and I are, as well. So I thought I had best post this. Winamp 5.52 is devoid of the vulnerability and I think upgrading is a critical matter.

Media players in general are taking huge security hits of late. This is because if such a player makes the use of more than one format possible, it also aggregates vulnerabilities. I am not at all happy about the problems in media players. They affect Free Software and open source players, as well. I seem to be upgrading my Linux players at about the same rate as I have to do with the Windows ones. Problems are evidently endemic to the type of application. Wonderful news, eh?

Jack

Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu

You all know I'm an Ubuntu fan. However; this complaint by Matt Chisholm agrees with my experience and, frankly, it is a huge drawback to those like he and I who are able to coherently report bugs and willing to do so.

The pace of development at Ubuntu must be frantic, judging by the 6 month release schedule. Combine that with some cultural problems within the Ubuntu organization and (to some extent) the community and you have an atmosphere that is somewhat unfriendly to those reporting problems. Not really unfriendly. Nothing like that. But unresponsive and at times acting as if the bug were something personal the reporter accused them of.

I think once made aware of this, the Ubuntu folks will change their ways. That is what has happened at every turn when their users have called for change. It might take them some time, but that is just human nature.

Jack

Bot detector by Trend Micro

Now here's an interesting concept. It's free to try, right now, and I recommend trying it as soon as possible, especially on Aunt Sally's PC, if you know what I mean.

Jack

ULTRA Stackable

Now here is a development that threatens to remove one of my cat's favorite pleasures; the exploration of the cable nest under my desk. Only God knows what she thinks of it, but she always looks very satisfied when emerging alive from the clutter.

They're stackable peripherals. Not printers and such, but media readers, external storage; all sorts of stuff. Victor Wu has done a good job of reviewing this stuff over at Bjorn3D. The article is a bit "rah-rah" for me, but still, the gear is indeed enticing. Check it out.

Jack

Four critical vulnerabilities in Apple QuickTime

You've got to feel sorry for Apple over this, which comes on top of other, as yet unfixed critical vulnerabilities in Quicktime. Some of them require only a visit to a specially crafted web site, so they are really serious problems.

For right now, I would simply uninstall any Quicktime versions on my machine and do without until I knew for sure it was safe. Apple is apparently working frantically on the problems; they released four fixes already. Still, the application is not yet safe.

Jack

HP provides an update about WHS woes

Our good buddy Paul Thurrott has a post about Hewlett-Packard's MediaSmart Servers running Microsoft Windows Home Server and data corruption problems.

Now when you read this, keep in mind that these problems are completely avoidable and do not affect your backups made with Windows utilities and most others. It is nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Plus, as I reported last week, at least one team of dedicated researchers has been unable to reproduce the problem. The problem is real, but not the end of the world. And you can easily dodge the bullet.

Jack

NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says

From wired:
In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: 'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'"