Friday, March 26, 2010

Find your own bugs!

I betcha' Jobso and Fester feel about this tall now - 'cos I'm the king

Three-peater winner Charlie Miller of the Pwn2Own competition told Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to find their bugs in their software. Not unlike Sheldon from Big Bang Theory,  our man took  mere seconds to detect and exploit flaws in all targets before the other contestants applied finger to keyboard. Tradition states, the winner demonstrates the exploit to the companies’ engineers, but Mr Miller has taken great offense to the idea.

“We find a bug, they patch it,” said Miller. “We find another bug, they patch it. That doesn’t improve the security of the product. True, [the software] gets incrementally better, but they actually need to make big improvements. But I can’t make them do that.”

Miller’s technique is not unique and is in fact used by all three companies to test software for flaws before it’s released, which begs this question : does Microsoft, Adobe and Apple’s software development teams knowingly release “buggy” software, hoping no one will find, detect or exploit the flaws? What is going on around here, anyway?


Sunday, March 14, 2010

Linux kernel 1.0 turns Sweet Sixteen

Dance for me, Stallman, dance!

As long as we’re celebrating nerdsylanian things, Wikipedia notes in its On This Day section:”1994 – Version 1.0.0 of the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel, was released, becoming one of the most prominent examples of open source software.” Looking forward to 3.0.0 very very soon, yes?


Happy π (pi) Day

Yes, nerdsylvanians, it’s that time of year when people do fun things with circles, calendars, baked goods, calculators, slide rules, super computers and gosh knows what else to celebrate the value of π.

The Google people are doin’ their part to commemorate the day:

learn more about pi at Wikipedia, for a start then hit these links , next

Hi, my name is is Larry Shaw, the founder of Pi Day. I'm called The Prince of Pi. Can you tell?


Friday, December 4, 2009

Haiku is … er … alpha!

Ten years ago

when Jean-Louis Gassée threw in the towel with Be,Inc.,

he left a number of users out in the wilderness wondering,

now what? Well, since a lot of BeOS users were Unix and Linux coders,

They took it upon themselves to create a free open source version of the BeOS (after begging Gassée to set it free – well, that didn’t happen, did it?).

It has taken ten years, no, I’m not kidding, ten years, to get to alpha 1! And these fine upstanding nerdsylvanians actually believe their efforts will pay off and their li’l OS will actually compete and eventually supplant Linux and Windows! Now a lot of “true believers” gave up during the decade and discovered the magical wunnerfulness that is Mac OS X or wandered over into the Linux camp.The Linuxtards used to shun the remaining BeOS fanbois, but now happily welcome them to their little conventions where they set up a table and everyone humors them and grabs a disk and flyer, so the poor deluded souls don’t feel left out but in truth, even

Citizen Stallman laughs at these guys and he’s been working on The Hurd for, what, thirty years? It’s not worth arguing with these fellas, they are hard core and now they’re hustling converts. Wanna’ check it out? C’mon it won’t kill ya’ … you might even have fun. You see, BeOS, back then, really was special and kewl, the problem was nobody knew how to to imbue that to the masses, not a sane or capable marketing guy in the company. Had Gassée got his price and Apple bought Be, Inc., instead of NeXT,

Apple would probably be on the junk heap of history, and The Borg at this time would have been busy flicking away Linuxtards and shoving pieces of shit like Windows Me SE Service Pack 9 down the great unwasheds throats while evilly racking up the bucks.

For its time, BeOS was state of the art, but Be was not to be, cherie. Last heard, the intellectual property that is BeOS is being held captive by some Japanese mobile phone outfit. Palm had it previously and still couldn’t figure out how to make money with the damn thing. Then that iPhone thing happened.

And what the true die hards have now is something about ten years behind everything else out there … but hey, maybe I’m wrong, maybe, people will take notice, maybe people will ….nnnnaaaahhhhh, are you on dope? C’mon even Neal Stephenson wised up and switched from Beos to Mac OS X.

Good luck, Be-tards, or is that Haiku-tards?

UPDATE:  I figured it out – They’re Wanna-Bes!  Wheeee, I get a gold star!