Reprint

I'm going to reproduce the same post that I have just done chez-moi, on the basis that I have not howled as much in forever...

There's a show on one of the BBC channels called Mock the Week and I saw one of the funniest gags ever last night. It will probably not translate to print, but here you go. The subject was terrorism. Some stand-up guy I have never heard of stepped up:

"Terrorism? Tony Blair says we should be worried about Osama Bin Laden having WMDs. Listen, I've seen the pictures. The guy has a donkey and a rifle....when I see an ICBM strapped to the back of the donkey, then I'll be worried."

Priceless. Stan will like that one.

The Truth is Out There - But This Isn't It

I downloaded the 9/11 conspiracy web-flick Loose Change. It's an odd theory, that the US government planned the 9/11 disaster for the benefit of family and friends, and to give a pretext for America to go on to screw up a bunch of Muslim countries beyond recognition.

Like they needed to go to those kind of lengths for that.

You can find a fair summary of the plot on Wikipedia, so I won't waste my keyboard repeating it.

The thing is - you believe the people involved might actually think it a cool idea, but you doubt that they would actually be capable of managing a conspiracy of this size.

My favourite debunking of the Moon-Landing hoax is that Russians would have been tracking the lunar module extremely carefully, and it certainly wouldn't have been in their interest to keep quiet if NASA were pulling a fast one.

This line of questioning I think explodes the Loose Change hypothesis also. All those possible ways the truth could have got out - all those governments with no reason to help America hush up mass-murder.

The film is a nasty, amateurish, pseudo-scientific piece of opportunistic garbage. I'm slightly ashamed at wasting bandwidth downloading it - please don't make the same mistake.

BBC - your Windows on the World

Seems the BBC and Microsoft are engaging in an extended smooch.

I'm scratching my head as to why - I know the BBC are using Microsoft technology to protect their Digital Rights on the BBC on-demand service. But that's no good reason to give free, uncritical coverage to the latest piece of bloat-ware from Seattle.

Reminds me of the column in "Private Eye" devoted to shameless plugs for Murdoch TV in Murdoch newspapers and vice versa.

There was a piece on News Watch on BBC24 which tried to address the issue, but really it just gave me some more ammunition for my cause.

What's the story ? I'm guessing I won't find the answers on the BBC.

Doppleganger

Every now and again, you meet people who are as completely reasonable as you are. Stan is one of them.

I was just going to comment about how he should just go ahead and do the Linux thing but then I realised that the caveat that you should stay with XP is perfectly justifiable. If you're not of a techie bent, moving to an OS that has the following commands, you're a tad buggered:

fsck whatever
kill -9 whatever
rm -rf /*
1,$s:Kenny/Self-righteous git/g

I happen to agree with Stan on this one. The security holes are one thing, but the biggest problem with it is that you need a bloody super-computer to run it. God knows how many gigabtyes of memory and oodles of disk space.

Microsoft, in 2001, realised that Sun were going to be a big problem when they released a 64-bit Solaris. So, a little known fact, is that there's a switch that you can use where XP boots into a simulated 64-bit environment. In reality what that means is that you can actually access what a 64-bit OS will be able to address. 32-bit OS's can address 2 gig of memory. After that, it's, to coin a Blackadder phrase, like a broken pencil: pointless. Microsoft missed the boat again.

This whole thing amuses me no end. I am one of the people who suffered from when Microsoft
simulated a 32-bit OS back in whenever via a "thunk" layer that mapped 32-bit calls to their 16-bit OS. At the time, TCP/IP was provided by third party suppliers like FTP, Wollongong, Banyan, DEC etc. We had a support contract with Microsoft at the time that allowed us access to third line support immediately. I called them saying that Windows for Workgroups broke DEC's Pathworks. They hung up and never called back. I eventually worked out what the problem was called to tell them -- gratitude was not exactly overflowing.

The problem is that if you have a bunch of celever academics and give them a problem, there's a kind of puritanist approach to it. I'm not saying that a "thunk" layer is a bad idea, just that if you're going to do it, do it right. And understand what you are doing.

And while you're at it, watch those buffer overflows. That is schoolboy stuff. Stan's warnings should be heeded.

Don't Panic - Share and Enjoy - Vista is your friend

Anyone who has any knowledge at all of commercial IT will love this quote about a security hole with Windows Vista.

"Microsoft said the exploit was "technically possible" but there was no need to worry. "

I'm reminded of quotations from spokesmen from the Nuclear industry, Big Tobacco, and the Conservative Party. Also Douglas Adams :-

ARTHUR: The ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal ... is it safe?
FORD: Oh yes, it's perfectly safe ... it's just us who are in
trouble.

Microsoft have taken complacency to a whole new level. This user will be sticking with XP for a fair time to come.