There is an amusing article on Slate called How to Steal Wi-Fi … and how to keep the nieghbors from stealing yours (well, I thought it was amusing, anyway). The title says it all. The author references another article that gives tips for wireless home network security as well.
There is also an Introduction to Wireless Security and a Wireless Networking FAQ that may be helpful to those looking to set up wireless connectivity in their homes.
There is a very interesting article on groklaw called The Novell v. Microsoft Case – Statute of Limitations Explained that I found during my morning slashdot browsing.
It’s an interesting read on the latest anti-trust complaint filed against Microsoft by Novell regarding the destruction of Wordperfect and Quattro Pro.
Apparently the author will be covering the case for groklaw, and recommends that Free / Open Source advocates watch the case very closely.
On another note, I read in an article on MSNBC that Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, now owns a company called Intellectual Ventures, whose whole business revolves around, as written in the article, ” … create or buy new ideas, accumulate patents—exclusive rights to use the inventions—and rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products.”
How sad a world do we live in where companies can be started only to buy and sell rights to ideas?
I’m not a big fan of the patent system at all. The fact of the matter is, you can patent anything so generally that it genuinely hampers innovation as a whole. With Microsofts huge rants on innovation during their anti-trust trial, it’s interesting to see some of the things they’ve patented (or tried to anyway) for themselves — such as the FAT file system, an attempt that was later rejected, at least temporarily.
My personal opinion is that no one should have exclusive rights to an idea – and if your basic argument in an antitrust case is “innovation”, you shouldn’t be a major participant in a system that kills it.
At least there are some companies actually using the patent system for the common good.
According to slashdot this morning, Sun has announced the open sourcing of the Solaris operating system. From what I could glean from the referenced articles, this covers the x86 version of the operating system, and while security fixes will be supplied for the free version, receiving bug fixes will cost you $120 per processor, per year, with additional support plans going up from there.
I personally hate the idea of paying for anything “per cpu, per year”. I like models where you can pay for support for a machine, no matter how many processors the machine has. This pricing model alone would keep me from actually using Solaris in lieu of a competing Linux distribution.
According to Novell.com, Novell has released their enterprise desktop distribution, Novell Linux Desktop.
You can read the press release on their web site.
I started running SuSE Linux when Redhat stopped doing retail distributions in lieu of the Fedora Project and never looked back. I had run SuSE 8 back in the day and wasn’t really impressed. They have done a great job on the distributions since Novell bought them, integrating the Ximian desktop into the product. I’m interested to see what the new desktop product looks like.
My reasoning for the switch at the time is that I just don’t like downloading distributions. I like being able to go to the store, buy a distribution, and install it without all the headaches of waiting hours for a download and burning the CD’s myself. I guess the whole CD burning thing is one thing that I haven’t really embraced yet.
It wound up for the best, as I think SuSE is one of the best distributions I have run thus far, from a “consumer wanting a desktop” perspective.
Bieber Labs 