This morning I thought I’d try and spice this blog up a little by making my own logo and then I realised why I never did it before: this laptop is godd*mn slow! This is why I never got to installing Photoshop, the program I’ve been using for years to create my own stuff.
“PCLinuxOS 2009.1 is a superb distro. It’s very well made. In particular, the Gnome edition is the crown jewel of this release, with great stability, fresh looks, and tons of excellent programs across a broad range of sections”
Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn’t immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. “For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren’t designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren’t available and research is only starting.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Houston 2600 sends this excerpt from the Register about an open-source security assessment tool Microsoft presented at CanSecWest: “Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it’s still under development. As its name suggests, !exploitable Crash Analyzer (pronounced ‘bang exploitable crash analyzer’) combs through bugs that cause a program to seize up, and assesses the likelihood of them being exploited by attackers. Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security expert who also provides consulting services to Microsoft, hailed the release a ‘game changer’ because it provides a reliable way for developers to sort through thousands of bugs to identify the several dozen that pose the greatest risk.”
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MJackson writes “BT has revealed new details about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from next-generation broadband services, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps from early next year (2010). Overall, BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT’s local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“Modern psychology has attempted to classify how good we are at a certain skill by observing how deep it perforates that iceberg. It thus describes four stages of competence an individual can achieve. In this article I’ll try to apply this simple scheme to the skill we practice everyday: programming.”
krebsatwpost writes “TrafficConverter.biz, one of the more notorious pay-per-install affiliate programs, was dismantled this week after media attention caused Visa and Mastercard to shut down the group’s payment operations. The action comes just a few days after a report by The Washington Post that showed some affiliates were making more than 0,000 USD a week installing rogue anti-virus software. The credit card industry may have been spurred by the fact that the first version of the Conficker worm told infected systems to download a file from TrafficConverter, although the story posits that this could have been an attempted Joe Job rather than a blatant attempt to drum up more installs.”
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aremstar writes “I’m a final-year Computer Science student from the UK. During my studies, we covered 3 programming languages: C, C++ and Java. The issue is that we didn’t cover any of these languages in sufficient depth for me to claim that I have commercial-ready experience. It’s one thing being able to write simple programs for class assignments, but those are quite different from writing something as complex as the Linux kernel or a multi-threaded banking app. I’m thinking of spending a few weeks/months studying in order to specialize in one of those languages. Fortran also entered my consideration, as it is great for numerical computing and used by many financial institutions, banks, etc. In terms of skill requirements in job ads, my (brief) experience suggests that most programming jobs require C++, with Java a close second. C — unfortunately — doesn’t appear as much. My question is: if you were in my shoes, which language would win your time investment? My heart suggests C, with a little bit of Fortran to complement it, but I’m a bit worried that there might not be enough demand in the job market.”
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The Narrative Fallacy writes “John Markoff has a story at the NY Times speculating about what will happen on April 1 when the Conficker worm is scheduled to activate. Already on an estimated 12 million machines, conjectures about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day prank — to far darker notions. Some say the program will be used in the ‘rent-a-computer-crook’ business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. ‘The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode,’ writes Markoff. According to a paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. With these capabilities, Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible. On a darker note, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the possibility of a ‘Dark Google.’ ‘What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers,’ writes Markoff. ‘That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.'”
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bugnuts writes “Blizzard has announced a policy change regarding add-ons for the popular game World of Warcraft which asserts requirements on UI programmers, such as disallowing charging for the program, obfuscation, or soliciting donations. Add-ons are voluntarily-installed UI programs that add functionality to the game, programmed in Lua, which can do various tasks that hook into the WoW engine. The new policy has some obvious requirements, such as not loading the servers or spamming users, and it looks like an attempt to make things more accessible and free for the end user. But unlike FOSS, it adds other requirements that assert control over these independently coded programs, such as distribution and fees. Blizzard can already control the ultimate functionality of add-ons by changing the hooks into the WoW engine. They have exercised this ability in the past, e.g. to disable add-ons that automate movement and facilitate ‘one-button’ combat. Should they be able to make demands on independent programmers’ copyrighted works, such as forbidding download fees or advertising, when those programmers are not under contract to code for Blizzard? Is this like Microsoft asserting control over what programmers may code for Windows?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
