Fragt man sich doch ab und an, was im Gehirn eines Mitarbeiters einer Patentbehörde vor sich geht. Wenn man dies liest, und dann zwischen den Zeilen liest, sieht das aus wie ein klassisches DRE-Handbuch für den informatischen Bereich. Microsoft hat nun die elektronische Version davon patentiert.

I've upgraded my desktop to Mandrake 10.2, AKA Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition, the first version after the merger between Connective and Mandrake Software.

Ah, how nice is the idea that in Kalifornia, you cannot own an 'assault weapon', especially the black sort. At least they don't discriminate against the color of the gun anymore, maybe inspired by this exhibit. However, this doesn't mean they regulary screw up. Like selling a gun and only later find out that it is banned, as described in this quite informative thread over at one of the bigger gun boards.

Es ist doch ein schräges Plätzchen, diese europäische Union, die gerade drauf und dran ist, die Dienstleistungsrichtlinie ganz zu kippen. Man hat nämlich, nach reichlicher Überlegung und einigen Experimenten an Arbeitslosen herausgefunden, dass diese nicht für die gleichen Löhne wie ein Osteuropäer arbeiten können, weil das Leben in Deutschland doch noch recht teuer ist, wenn man den Sozialstaat finanzieren muss.

Some people don't get it.

If you post "Donuts for free", you'll have a bazillion people lining up to feed themselves with that junk.

If you put up a sign "No guns", you can be sure that you just did the equivalent, just for crooks and criminals which are always on the lookout for easy targets (like politicians). And as predicted, it happened, since gun-free utopia doesn't even exist in places that did ban handguns, like Tony Blaris fiefdom.

Seems like the Americans now even have some problems seperating Switzerland and Russia, and so our IT infrastructure is centralized in Russia.

Maybe that's the case. But then, it's a pretty sure thing that the poor "Mr 500 Servers" didn't put the servers to work, but rather makes himself busy with remote administration when a machine fails so badly it has to be reinstalled. I never hope these poor chaps catch one of these really interesting Windows illnesses that takes down his servers like the famed divine wind.

One would have thought that OWA could be one of the best webmail softwares on the world. But never think that big is beautiful. Some other can do that little trick of modifying an assined task. If I have to use a 'full' client to such things, it kinda defeats the purpose of having a webmail attached to Exch

Seems some companies have forgotten about some older platforms like Amiga that used to have some sort of copy protection that hit the hardware directly (thus, for example, making software incompatible with some hardware platforms that else supports the OS perfectly well), even assuming the user is running a standard desktop without any special hardware.

Again, and again and again. People openly claim that Windows is more secure than Linux. Alas, as usual, they're comparing apples with oranges. And maybe they should compare their oranges with real Apples as well.

They claim a "Window of vulnerability" that is much longer with Linux, measured from the day a vulnerability is known to the day it is fixed, averaging 79 days on Linux according to the report. They claim it on the fact that Microsoft actually made their operating system more secure, and more difficult to exploit. Maybe it's true - we can't judge this since we don't have the sourcecode at our disposal for review.

Wow. Da kriegts doch ein Softwaremagnat von einer bekannten Softwarefirma hin, wieder mal die Horden hirnloser Computerfreaks in allen Lebenslagen zu beraten, insbesondere auch wenn es um MP3-Player geht. Nun ja, ganz unrecht haben die Spezis bei Migrosoft schon nicht, aber so einige Punkte sind doch, gelinde gesagt, erstaunlich intressant:

Seems like lots of people are plain stupid.

They buy from spammers. Yet they don't love spam, and complain loudly when another unwanted email hits their mailbox.

Looks to me like quite a percentage of the people should at least go to reeducation camps, although I doubt reeducation will have any effect. Maybe reincarnation would...

For some reason, my accounts gets bombarded with eBay phishing schemes, altough nobody noticed that I don't fall for their stuped tricks trying to infect me with some spyware to sniff my passwords (the latest specialist can be found here). However, there was some big programming mistake in the original page and it got corrected here.

Ah, the joys of some bunch of professional spambags preying for the eternally dumb people. The page looks actually quite authentic (no wonder since it uses the same pictures and cascading style sheets as ebay does), but those who fall for it still think ebay will mail them for such matters.

Comes there a spam from some Russian outfit that wants to upgrade my web browser to some product from Redmond....no, I don't need that phishing scam, and I don't need a new browser, thank you very much.

I finally come around to get the latest uncrippled OpenSSL version bagged into RPMs for Redhat9 and the Fedora project. The previous versions were desribed here.

...are damned to repeat it.

Remember 1996 and 1997? We had a cool thing called land.c that could easily crash most TCP/IP stacks, including then, AmiTCP.

Remember what operating systems used to be susceptible to it? Yep, Windows 95, AmigaOS, some really, really old Linux kernels and some old Solaris stuff.