OVELL, makers of SuSE Linux, predict that Windows Vista will be the catalyst for many to migrate to Linux. This was argued explicitly last month in the light of outrageous hardware requirements, as well as the lack of features.

CEO of Novell, Jack Messman, was implicitly referring to issues such as the inability to uninstall all browsers from Windows, unlike, for instance, games and entertainment components. Internet Explorer, after all, is forged into the operating system.

Messman claimed that certain features of Office allowed employees to waste time at work by making it easy for them to browse non-work-related sites.

…

Do you really want to pay for all the excess functionality in Windows that distracts your employees and reduces their productivity?

A few details on the release date are sure to confuse prospective users that still remain in the dark.

According to a recent report from Windows IT Pro, Windows Vista is due to ship on Dec. 7, 2006. However Microsoft has refused to confirm or deny the reports and continues to claim simply that Windows Vista will ship in the second half of next year.

Related items from the farther past:

• XP + New Colours = Longhorn (Vista)
• Longhorn (Vista): A Trainwreck?

N excellent and comprehensive review of the iPod nano comes from ars technica. The review is full of clean shots of the nano. To spice things up, the durability of the iPod is put into the test with cars running over, bashes into the ground, etc. I warmheatedly recommend this visually-rich review, which is not vandalistic in nature. The picture shown above is somewhat misleading.

Manufacturer: Apple (product page)
System requirements: Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later, USB port; Windows PC running Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP SP2, USB port
Price: US$199 (2GB), US$249

Also see: Sony’s ‘iPod’

Skype are to be bought by eBay in a strategic move which aims to ease comminication between sellers and buyers. Perhaps it will also enable real-time voice auctions.

eBay’s chief executive said:

By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the net.

I sometimes get curious as to the background of some authoritative figures. Here are some interesting facts, which should not be treated as gossip, but strictly as objective facts. Bill Gates at his early days is described in an outdated mini biography, a snippet of which lies below:

His (Bill’s) great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent lawyer.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, who now share a large Boeing 767 passenger plane, appear to have come from so-called “academic families”. Page’s father, Carl Victor, is a computer science professor at Michigan State University, where Larry also began his studies. Brin likewise, but it is the University of Maryland where his father Michael works on mathematics. His mother appears to have worked (possibly still does) in NASA.

The facts above make one wonder if a family of overachievers is a pre-requisite for success. I hope this is merely a coincidence that which not broadly reflect on reality. I can honestly confess that my parents were never educated at a high level. In fact, computers are known to them only at a fundamental level, e.g. Web surfing and Microsoft Word.

When I first set up this site, which is administered using cPanel, I was blocked access to a terminal (AKA shell, console, command-line) and denied telnet/SSH access by the Web host. By default, most hosts do likewise, depriving site owners from excessive flexibility in hope that security will not be jeopardised and sites will rarely ‘break’. Nonethess, I found a terminal workaround, which I would like to share.

Run command as a cron job (widget/icon shown above). Have it scheduled to run a minute later with output to get sent by E-mail (default option) or saved to a file, e.g.

du -all >~/output_file

output_file, which gets created in your home directory, should then contain text that otherwise will have appeared in a terminal. Likewise, virtually anything including installations can be carried out. System administrators would become distressed if this practice became commonplace. In essence, this is the same as having a terminal-based interface, albeit it is slower and unresponsive.

Example cron job in cPanel – periodic mySQL backups (click image for full-sized equivalent)

The display blends with the player’s body

AVE you had a peek at the new Sony Walkman, which aims to compete with Apple’s iPod? Since Apple have introduced the ultra-thin iPod nano and will soon incorporate a mobile phone, Sony appear to have fallen behind already. Their 20 GB player does not look elegant to me. Have a look, however, at how its display blends with the actual body. The white captions are part of the display, which is almost unbelievable and probably unprecedented.

NE wonders if error logs of Web sites could become the next target for spammers. Webmaster already suffer from comment spam, unrouted E-mail spam, and referrer spam.

Fortunately, error log spam appears to in its diapers. I believe it is only a matter of time before it becomes a serious plague. Below are some thoughts, all of which were sparked in recent discussions in nntp://alt.www.webmaster after we had observed odd yet identical errors in our logs.

Many requests appear to come from Seoul, seeking a file called robotsxx.txt, a variation of the usual robots.txt, which is fully-standardised. Upon closer inspection, it looked like this was related to ‘adult’ material. The IP address seems to have been associated with pornographic content.

To stress the danger of such requests becoming commonplace, our error logs could soon be accommodated with requests like:

GET /enlarge_YOUR_log_www.bigbeef.com HTTP/1.1
      (funny example from Alan)

It is worryingly easy to automate such requests and spam the entire World Wide Web en masse, leaving such invalid requests for tens of millions of Webmasters to see. Will there soon be filters for site referrers and error logs too? Let us hope we need not go down that route.