Author: Dr. Bill

I am using Google’s new “Chrome” web browser to type this entry. First impressions: it seems faster, and smoother than other browsers… I suppose that is due to multiple processes handling things… however, it doesn’t seem to support Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming plugin… I guess not too surprising. Anyway, fairly impressive for a version 1.0 browser!

Whoa! You thought the Mac/PC ads were cool! When it was announced that Jerry Seinfeld would be doing Vista ads… you can imagine Apple quaking in their boots… NOT! Seinfeld’s show was famously a “show about nothing.” Well, so are these commercials! Keep in mind M$ spent $300,000,000.00 on them. Ouch.

The First Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft Ad Makes No Sense

“Besides the slick and probably expensive editing designed to make Jerry Seinfeld look like the more awkward of the pair, there’s not a whole lot of special effects in this clip. In fact, there’s not really a whole lot of anything, including laughs, information or pimping of Vista. It’s kinda like Seinfeld’s really long, really rambling Superman ad for Amex he did a few years back. We hope the rest of the campaign is better. They did get Bill Gates to use his mug shot somewhere in the spot (not spoiling it by saying where), but other than that we’re underwhelmed.”

Watch it… and then ask yourself… does this make me want to run out and buy Vista? Ahhh…no!

A quarter of a century of open source, completely free software. Wow! And, I remember it when it happened. Pretty wild!

GNU turns 25

“No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It’s leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to create a complete Unix-like system that would be completely open and hackable, giving anyone the right to modify and distribute the work. The Free Software Foundation is getting its celebration in early. The innovation of the GPL software licence only followed some years later, but it was driven by GNU’s needs, and it was to have profound consequences for the computer industry. 25 years ago, Stallman saw the project as a way of continuing the community ethic of shared code, something he felt was in danger of being eclipsed by the arrival of new, commercial software companies, seeking to capitalize on work in the labs. It’s not so strange if you look at it through Stallman’s eyes: software was a tool that had always been open, hackable and redistributable, and now mediocre people in ill-fitting suits were trying to steal that freedom… by making a quick buck with dodgy products, and putting very little back. One of these was Bill Gates – others were a host of start-ups seeking to take the code and make commercially useful products with the lab work. Ambitious and insecure, these start-ups all needed to explain their USP to venture investors as a kind of “secret source”. So Stallman set about creating a free alternative. Over the next few years, he created a toolchain that allowed other developers to create working, open computer systems on entirely new and alien hardware. He wrote the gcc compiler, with Richard Mlynarik the gdb debugger. With a few other tools, this was enough for a ‘bootstrapping’ system: both the gcc and gdb were of such high quality that the fame spread, particularly amongst the embedded community. Phones, switches, A to D converters… boxes of all kinds ran on, and trusted, GNU.”

So, why would you want to use Gmail as your SMTP Gateway? Well, let’s say that you have a laptop that you travel with. And you have Mozilla Thunderbird set up as your e-mail client. On your local, home network, you use your ISP’s SMTP gateway, and all is well. But when you take your laptop and go to Starbuck’s using their WiFi connection… you can’t send e-mail. Drat!

What do you do? Well, if you have a Gmail account (they are free, after all) then you can do this… set up Gmail as your out-going SMTP Gateway. Simply fill in the fields in Thunderbird as shown in the screenshot, and you are good to go! Handy, huh?

(Don’t forget the SSL radio button, and the port definition!)

Remember the Muppet show’s “Pigs in Space?” Well, now it is “Virii in Space!” If even the International Space Station can get a computer virus… well, is nowhere safe from these evil minions of the “pigs” that design viruses? Sigh.

Computer Virus Hits ISS, Should NASA Worry?

“It was confirmed yesterday by NASA that they have discovered a computer virus on a laptop that is aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The big question that has come out of this though, is should NASA worry? The virus was first discovered by Symantec back on August 27, 2008, with the virus being called W32.Gammima.AG. It impacts systems running Windows 2000, 95, 98, Me, NT, XP, and Windows Server 2003. At this point though, it does not seem that there is much of a threat to NASA directly from the virus. The report states that the virus is very easy to contain and remove, and can cause minimal damage. The best thing the virus can do is steal passwords, but it is not believed that the worm virus could do any damage to NASA at this. NASA is seeing it as more of a pain than a major threat, and for good reason. Many continue to question though how a virus managed to get on the International Space Station in the first place. Don’t they have virus scanning software?”

Notice a black screen with a notice that “You may be a victim of software counterfeiting” on your PC? It may be the result of Microsoft’s latest Genuine Windows Program!

New Windows Genuine authenticator can blank desktop backgrounds

If in the last week or so you’ve noticed that your desktop background in Windows XP Professional goes completely black exactly every 60 minutes, don’t worry, it’s not a virus. A blackened desktop is the latest indication that the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program has determined your copy of the operating system to be non-authentic, as a service of its latest version rolled out to XP Professional users this week. ‘The desktop background can be reset to anything else in the usual ways,’ wrote WGA senior product manager Alex Kochis yesterday, ‘but every 60 minutes it will change back to the plain black background. This will continue to happen until that copy of Windows is genuine.’ Kochis’ team has been tinkering with multiple ways to provide some kind of ‘in-your-face’ notice to the user that Microsoft doesn’t believe his copy of Windows to be a valid one, without making any kind of implied accusation that somehow the user is at fault. For Windows Vista, WGA disables the Aero translucent front-end, substituting the more conventional ‘Vista Basic’ theme instead. In addition to the blackened desktop, the new WGA will show a transparent, immobile notice in the lower right corner of the screen: ‘You may be a victim of software counterfeiting.’ The notice will remain in place whatever software the user may try to run, though it’s probably not intense enough to cause screen burn-in.”