Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

Wonderful: US Army Signs $471,000,000 Deal for Microsoft Software

The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine.

Hmm, interesting…

You guys have to remember that there is a HUGE digital divide out there and getting soldiers with out much education comfortable with computers tends to be quicker and easier with Windows.

Therefore you want to simplify the training by standardizing on a system which not only holds the record for security vulnerabilities, but whose source has been delivered to the electronic warfare departments of most of our potential enemies but NOT to our own academic-community security specialists?

What do you do the next time there’s a conflict and some new crop of blended-threat self-propagating worms (locusts?) suddenly takes out the US Army’s entire office infrastructure?

Posted on by lhl

Wow, pretty harsh Liz Phair review on Pitchfork. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 0.0 score since I started reading Pitchfork regularly.

Ten years after Exile, Liz has finally managed to accomplish what seems to have been her goal ever since the possibility of commercial success first presented itself: to release an album that could have just as easily been made by anybody else.

For interest, here are the other 0.0’s I could find:

And on the other end, the 10.0’s (interestingly, The Flaming Lips has one in each):

Posted on by lhl

Gijs Van Tulder wrote a recent article on Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database. (see my older database tree links.

I actually use a different method than either the simple adjacency list or the modified preordered tree traversal algorithms – basically I used thread id’s in my query, reading in batches of nodes by thread and then used a simple depth-first traversal (recursive) function to put each thread together. I need to try out some different algorithms and test out the performance differences and flexibility.

Posted on by lhl

Torvalds Speaks Out on SCO, Linux:

SCO alleges that you need to focus more on getting clarification as to where the code that goes in the Linux kernel comes from. Do you have any plans to change the current Linux development model?

No. I allege that SCO is full of it, and that the Linux process is already the most transparent process in the whole industry. Let’s face it, nobody else even comes close to being as good at showing the evolution and source of every single line of code out there. The only party that has had serious problems clarifying what they are talking about is SCO, and now when details start emerging like with RCU, it’s clearly about IP that they had nothing to do with, and don’t even own. I’m sure that they are confident that they own the collective work of Unix, but that’s a separate thing entirely legally from being the actual copyright owner of any specific section of code.