Terminally Incoherent

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.