Terminally Incoherent

Dumb users are dumb:

User: I decided to clean up my hard drive a little bit. Is there any stuff I can safely delete to make more room?
Me: Well, any of your old files that you don’t use - I would back them up and then delete them…
User: Yeah, but other hand that, is there anything I can delete?
Me: Yes, clean out the browser cache and temp files… You can use the free tool at ccleaner.com to do that for you. It’s pretty good at freeing up space this way…
User: Oh, my Norton System Works already has something like that…
Me: Well, then there is not much else you can really do other than uninstalling software you do not use.
User: Well… I noticed I have this folder here and it’s pretty big… It’s almost 15 GB…
Me: Yes?
User: Well, it doesn’t seem to be used for anything. I was wondering if it can be deleted…
Me: What is the folder called?
User: Documents… No, wait… Documents and Settings
Me: [panic mode] Please tell me you didn’t delete that folder!
User: Uh? No, I wanted to ask you first.
Me: Oh, good! Don’t delete it. That is where all your user information is stored, your application settings, your Outlook emails. Also, your My Documents folder is stored in there…
User: Oh, no.. I have the My Documents folder elsewhere.
Me: No, trust me - when you click on the My Documents icon on the desktop it simply takes you to a folder inside Documents and Settings.
User: …
Me: It’s like a shortcut.
User: Um… Ok, if you say so…
Me: So don’t delete anything in that folder.
User: Ok, thanks.
Me: Anything else?
User: No, I think this is all I wanted to ask you about. Bye.

Granted, I don’t think Windows would actually let you delete all of the stuff in Documents and Settings. But with this guy, I’d rather not risk it. It’s the same dude that tried to clean up his HD in the past, by deleting NTLDR.

This is where a two partition scheme would probably work better. Just make C: the system drive, and tell users not to touch it, and set up D: or whatever as their data drive. Relocate My Documents to D: and you are all set. Tell users to install to C but save to D. This might be a worthwhile approach.

But then again, most of my users are smart enough not to delete system files.

I’m totally loving this poll:

source - cnn.com; click to enlarge

It seems that few people are rushing to get Vista. In fact, there are more CNN readers who do don’t care about the new OS at all, than those who are installing it as we speak.

I present to you, the Ultimate DRM Buster 2000:

photo © me

This nifty cable should allow you to copy all the protected music you want. You simply plug in one end to the earphone jack, you plug in the other to a microphone jack and you are set. There is some loss in quality, but hey - it works. It’s that easy.

Here is what I think - it is not possible to plug the “analog hole”. Sure you can try to make analog copying difficult, degrade quality and etc… But it is not possible to ever eliminate low tech analog solutions.

Btw, I found that cable in the “assorted junk and cables” drawer at work. No idea what did it originally come with or what was it originally for.

I’m trying to reinstall windows on an Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop. There is just no point in rescuing the current installation because it was running for several months without patching or an anti-virus installed. I actually ran it through the Dell diagnostics and it passed all the extended tests with flying colors - which suggests that at least according to Dell standards, the hardware is working just fine.

And yet, when I boot it off the Windows CD, the system just powers down when I get to the disk partitioning screen. WTF?

I booted it into safe mode and it’s been running for the last 20 minutes without any problems. What the hell is going on here? I just don’t get it. Normally I would suspect that there is a problem with the mobo or memory, or perhaps the fan (ie system craps out when the temperature spikes). But this behavior should be consistent and the system ought to shut down both in windows, while running the dell diagnostic just the same.

Could it be something with my windows CD? This is bugging the shit out of me! I have been trying this for like an hour now. Sometimes I get a little bit further - for example, I was able to delete the primary partition, but the thing powered down as I was trying to create new partitions…

Anyone ever experienced anything like that before?

(more…)

It appears that Alex Ionescu cracked the Vista DRM. At least he claims that he did. History likes to repeat itself… This will likely be like DeCSS all over again. DRM is just a flawed idea.

Let me explain to you why. Every kind of encryption hinges on a single principle - that the attacker does not have a key that would allow him to decrypt a cipher that was not intended for him. That’s it. You give the key only to the rightful recipient of the message. Everyone else who manages to intercept this message must either brute force the key, or try to attack the algorithm in different ways.

When we talk about DRM, we deal with an encryption problem in which the recipient is also the attacker. You sell the attacker a whole package - a ciphertext, a plaintext, a set of decryption keys and a binary version of the algorithm. The content must be both accessible, and impossible to access depending on the circumstance.

The only thing you can do is to make the system extremely complex, keep the implementation details secret, make the keys revocable, and build in all sorts of checks into your system. Then your system gets cracked again, and you need to put more layers of security. And then more again. This is the sort of arms race you cannot win - not in the long run at least.

Ok, who remembers this:

img © snafu.de

Apparently at the height of the browser wars in 97, someone dropped a huge, heavy IE sculpture at the lawn in front of Netscape offices in the dead of the night. Few people working a graveyard shift at Netscape noticed it, tipped it over and put their office mascot on top of it before anyone could notice it. In the morning people passing the Netscape offices saw a Mozilla stomping a fallen IE logo.

I admit, had no clue about this till today. I have no clue how did I keep missing it for all these years. Too funny!

Here is a WTF of the evening for you: Microsoft copies an idea, admits to it and then patents it. To make the long story short, they essentially filed a patent claim for… Well, whatever BlueJ does. They implemented strikingly similar set of features in Visual Studio 2005, and someone decided to patent it at that point. I have to say that the side by side comparison of the two is very telling. You can hardly tell which application is which - they are almost identical.

If this patent gets granted then it will be one of the biggest embarrassments for the USPTO in a while. Not only that. It would also put the creators of BlueJ in a very strange legal situation.

For example MS could effectively halt BlueJ development if they wanted to by demanding some obscene licensing fee from them. The law would be on their side since they would have the patent, so BlueJ creators would have to seek legal defense or close the shop. Eventually, I believe they would win, but their legal expenses would probably be a hard thing to swallow for an educational open source project like this.

Big thanks to ZeWrestler for pointing me to this story. It’s fucked up.

Here is a question for you guys: what is your favorite imaging software, and why?

I have a pile of old laptops that should be imaged. These machines are from 5 or 6 different dell models in there - each with different hardware. Some have win2k and some have WinXP OEM licenses on them. So obviously a single image is not going to cut it.

I need to figure out a good setup and tools for doing this efficiently. Any recommendations? I used Norton Ghost in the past, but that was a while ago. I just wanted to get a feel for what people use out there.

Thursdays are my research days which means I get a whole day off of work, and go to sit in my tiny office at MSU all day long, trying to get my thesis finished. Just to make it clear that I’m not working today, I figured I’d wear my black “no, I will not fix your computer” t-shirt. You would think that it would kinda drive the point home… But it didn’t. Typical reaction to that shirt was:

“No I will not fix… Oh! Haha! That’s funny… By the way, I have this issue with my wireless connection at home…”

Then there was a noisy fan problem, sound card problem, and two classics: “my computer is really slow” and “I get an error message sometimes”. I mean, Jesus Christ people! Read the fucking t-shirt! Do we have some nation-wide reading comprehension issue that I didn’t know about?

Sigh… I might as well had a “Free Tech Support” shirt on today - cause that’s how it felt like. I think they should put a warning label on it or something. Like: “Caution, do not wear in proximity to pathetic (l)users”.

Here is a question for you - how do I do anything with a Sun JDS Release 2 system? Sun has end-of-life’d it, and there is no community around it. So I have an old system here that no one uses anymore. There are no packages for it, no patches, no way to easily upgrade it. I think I’m just going ot install the x86 version of Solaris 10 on this machine at some point in the future.

For now though I need it up and running for my research, and I don’t really have time to mess around with reinstallation. I’m just wondering if there are other JDS users out there, or am I the last one.

If you know any dirty JDS tricks (like using SuSE packages, or hacking Yast to use SuSE repositories) I would love to hear them.