Phasor Burn

I need to examine this in more detail - how to get things done. Apparently it’s a good time management system that could help with information overload and paralysis.

I was reading an article in the paper today, about the perils of smart phones being the next target for malware. Unfortunately the Calgary Herald has some idiotic thing about making people pay for access to their articles online. Even making a big deal about giving a discount for people who buy physical paper subscriptions. Excuse me? If anything, the online version should be free to those who get a physical dead tree delivered to their doorstep…

Anyways, the article was by Scott Canon who was writing for the Knight Ridder Newspapers, so it is syndicated or whatever and I found a copy of it elsewhere.

Now, the information in the article is more or less on target, but there is one bit where the author really got my hackles up. OK two areas.

First is the use of the term Hackers in the bad sense. These guys are more properly known as Crackers. Educating the public and newspaper hacks of the proper terminology for this particular set of terms is nearly a complete waste of time. They’ve corrupted the terms for so long now that most of the hacker set have resigned themselves to this misuse.

The other hackles-raising bit in the article is where Scott says

Smart cellphones have yet to settle into a mostly Microsoft world where virtually every smart handset — really a smallish computer — employs the same operating system. Instead, scores of proprietary Apple-style systems still compete for market share. None of the most popular cellphone operating systems in the world has more than a sliver of the 1.6 billion global market.

Now, this statement is on it’s face mostly factual. Part of what he was getting at is that the diverse set of operating systems on the smartphones out there makes it difficult for malware writers to target more than a small percentage of the handsets. Cross platform code just doesn’t happen, especially with the poorly written stuff that is common of script kiddies.

More to the point, the near universal monoculture of Microsoft Operating Systems on the desktop is one of the main factors for why there are so many virii out there that cause no end of trouble for end users and administrators alike.

However, there’s another word misuse here. I emphasized the word in question in the quote above. Proprietary. Let’s review the dictionary definition for that, shall we?

Proprietary

pro·pri·e·tar·y Audio pronunciation of “proprietary” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-pr-tr)
adj.

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend’s house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.

No question that Apple has a proprietary operating system. At least, the bits layered on top of the BSD core are mostly proprietary. Scott Canon was completely missing that Microsoft Windows (any of the bazillion versions, from Win9x thru XP and all others that came before and after thus far) is Proprietary as could possible be by any stretch of the definition.

However, correcting this misunderstanding of the term proprietary when talking about Microsoft etc is likely to be a losing battle as well. This really pisses me off. Lunkheads.

Almost irks me as much as the billions of dollars wasted on bandwidth, server resources, etc in combatting spam. But that is another story for another time.

A reference to an interesting OpenSource KVM over IP solution with comercial backing came floating into my inbox via the SAGE members list today.

It appears to use custom frame-buffer pci cards that talk VNC. I think this means that they are os-independent and such you can use this system to control Windoze as well as Slowaris or Linux or BSD remotely even if the server hardware does not have serial console capability.

Still doesn’t get you the log-all-console-stuff that a decent LOM or other serial console connected to a terminal server and conserver would, but it’s better than a kick in the groin.

Too bad my current major contract had already spent many thousands (tens of thousands possibly) on a somewhat flakey Minicom Phantom MXII system. Well, I take some of that back. The Minicom gear hasn’t required a big-red-switch reset since I flashed all the various bits and bobble’s firmware six ways from sunday.