Phasor Burn

I can’t say I am unhappy with the office’s new internet pipe. It has been in place maybe 6 months now.

Enmax 100Mbit fibre. Yummy except for the bandwidth caps, so no frequent large file transfers (measured in tens of GB) over this to the datacentre. That’s what portable hard drives are for anyways.

Office -> Datacentre via public internet
8 hops, mostly Enmax, BigPipe, Shaw, Telus, Telus internal.
100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.815/2.334/10.166/0.900 ms

We talk mostly to the machines at the datacentre via VPN. One would think VPN would slow things down with the encryption, connection tracking etc. Especially since the VPN devices on each end are actually CentOS virtual machines with OpenVPN.

Yes, virtual machines.

The only time there is noticable impact seems to be when backups are running and hammering the VMWare host or guest on either end. Aside from that, we’re nice and zippy.

100 packets transmitted, 100 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.278/2.943/8.176/0.733 ms

I really can’t complain about this.

Much better than that crappy AllStream ADSL and Shaw Cable we had in the office previously.

SCO (Caldera) ordered to pay Novell

Seems to me that it boils down to the Sun UNIX contract where they wanted changes so they could take Solaris opensource. Now, what does that mean as to the validity of that change, for opensolaris’s future?

Especially since Novell is Microsoft’s bitch these days.

I’m not alone in this thinking :

[…] the amount awarded to Novell is so low that I find it unlikely that Novell will accept that amount and ratify the SUN license. It is more likely in my way of thinking that Novell will in the end refuse those funds, void the SUN license and call them up (just to see if they actually do want to legally open source Solaris).

Hey, if you open source technology which is not yours and you have not been so licensed, you are in serious trouble. And unlike SCO, SUN does have a lot of cash to lose if they are wrong. So the last thing that SUN wants, is to be sued by Novell for all damages resulting from open sourcing Solaris.

Read more here

Firefox 3 download today — they are trying to break some stupid record for most downloads of a software product in one day.

Well, pull something stupid like that and you’ll get what you deserve… a slammed site, probably isp’s that aren’t happy with you either, etc etc.

Wankers.

I am just dumbstruck by these quotes attributed to Jerry Lee Cooper.

Who’s that? Well, Google him for yourself.

You see, the Unix was designed to run within the VHF to UHF spectra (much like a radio), which is all well and good until you consider that modern computers run in the microwave range, at which regular radio reception starts to have serious issues. If one were to use a UHF receiver to tune in to a quad-phased broadcast in the Microwave spectra, one would fail miserably.

I would wager a bet that Ed Bott’s computing apparatus was a more contemporary design utilizing a 3GHz central processor unit (or CPU). Under such frequencies, the linux would literally tear itself apart, its code lacking the internal cohesion to sustain this extreme environment. The Microsoft by comparison, is streamlined and engineered to withstand this Microwave environment, thanks no doubt to the forethought of its designers.

I’m in awe of his stupendous ignorance. Unless it is a very well played troll. Normally, you should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

However, this is genuine gold comedy at its finest, and if it is not a series of trolls then someone should make sure this person gets hired by their worst enemy . . .

If PACE Interlok actually WORKED, if people were NOT able to copy the software, if pirated versions of Native Gold Bundle WEREN’T distributed free as water on the net, then at LEAST someone at Waves could say, “it sucked, but it worked.”

But it DIDN’T! Within weeks of the commercial release of Native Gold Bundle 3.0, pirated versions of the software were available everywhere!

So all of my pain and suffering was for NOTHING! NOTHING! That’s what makes me so unbelievably ANGRY! It was all for NOTHING!

The situation is so farcical that the common practice is, “buy the software, but install the crack.” A large majority of people I know and respect have all done exactly that. They purchased the software, so that they own a license, but they installed the pirated version, and so avoided the copy protection altogether.

You might ask why someone would install the pirated version if they own the license. The answer is that the common wisdom is that the pirated version (which does not contain any traces of PACE Interlok) is more stable, and if you need to reinstall it, you don’t have to request a reauthorization from Waves.

So in the final analysis it’s a wash. PACE Interlok is ineffective at preventing software piracy.

more here.

Amen.

The image processing software I use also contains this PACE Interlok crapoloa and all of the issues I have had with the software revolve completely around the activation process, update process, and failure of these things to actually work reliably.

I don’t mind spending hundreds of dollars on effective image processing software, really. I do mind when it contains copy protection software that fails to activate reliably, or at worst can destabilize the entire os.

Once I got thru the initial hurdles, DXO 4.5 does run well enough. I’m going to leave version 5 alone until they are up to at least 5.1 though. Lots of unrest on their forums over features that do not work, stability, and of course the wonderful drm hiccups.