* Posts by mstargard

5 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2011

Press Backspace 28 times to own unlucky Grub-by Linux boxes

mstargard

Pointless

This is a pointless feature. If you don't have physical security then you don't have any security. The only way to keep folks out of the hard drive is to encrypt it.

Google to NASA: Open source will not kill you

mstargard
WTF?

Huh?

K, now I'm confused. Isn't NASA the outfit that coined the phrase "It ain't software without the source code"? Damn. That just changes everything.

One-third of Aussies 'are pirates'

mstargard

Only a third?

And the other two thirds aren't admitting it.

Look, if you're going to make stuff up, as this study does, then at least make it "truthy".

How much benefit did this piracy create for the Australian economy?

Where was that freed household income spent?

How much benefit did this create for emerging artists in terms of better exposure?

How much benefit is this piracy to Australian society in general? After all, your culture is now backed-up and publicly available, not only to Australians, but to the rest of the world. And Australians are sampling other country's "back-ups" as well. There's a social benefit there - how much is that worth?

While I'm not advocating throwing the entertainment industry under the bus, I also don't want to see the rest of us pay to artificially sustain what is a very (very) tiny industry in the grand scheme of things.

What we see time and again, in lots of different countries, is heavy handed regulatory interference that hurts more than it helps.

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

mstargard

Oh, that Alpha, how I miss you.

I deployed and administered Alpha systems for years. I like several things about this system

- speed

- clean 64 bit. There was never any 32 bit baggage lying about, and so no worrying about which friggin' kernel you're running, or if the correct libraries are installed.

- Tru64 Unix - Compared to other mainstream vendors, this kicked ass. One great example - fiber channel storage just worked. Another - ethernet link aggregation.

- TruCluster - Version 1.5 was administered from a single command - asemgr. The problem with so many clustering solutions today is that they are so complicated that they undermine uptime. Version 5.x featured "single root" clusters. No other Unix system could do that.

- Tech support, forums, and support in the open source community. Mostly, I could just build open source software and it would just work.

What I hated, was DEC's licensing program. If your licenses expired, you were dead in the water with a non-functional system. Not so good for national systems.

Sony expands legal offensive to more PS3 hackers

mstargard
FAIL

Sony, again?

Attacking customers is not a good idea.