Subtitle: Media posts uninformed rubbish as commentary From the MSNBC story “ White House opens Web site coding to public ”: "Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after," said Terri Molini of Open Source for America, an interest group that has pushed for more such programs. Expecting Open Source to be

Recent password exposures at a number of online email services remind me to give a little advice on passwords. Definitely use this as a reminder to do something about your passwords – but don’t do the obvious thing. Don’t rush round and change all your passwords right away. Don’t change your passwords, change your password habits. Don’t use the same password everywhere. If your password gets exposed, or the service owner is malicious (or has a malicious staff member), you’ll be exposed everywhere

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be aware that today was the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system version, Windows 7. So, everyone else has their own ideas of what’s missing in Windows 7, here’s my list, and it’s not the same petty focus that everyone else seems to have. Mine is based on what I want, rather than what’s remotely close to being reasonably achievable. Media Center devices to provide support for DirecTV. Trimmable transparent screen overlays supporting multi-touch

http://types.cs.washington.edu/jsr308/ seems to be talking about a set of type annotations for Java that are similar to those provided in Microsoft Visual C++ by SAL, the Standard Annotation Language . One thing that the Java annotations have going for them over the SAL is that these annotations are going to be a part of the Java 7 standard, so it’s something that will come with the language no matter who implements it, whereas the C++ SAL extensions are specific to Microsoft. Of course, when I say

Google certainly sounds like it’s a nice place to work . Table football, free lunches, that whole “ don’t be evil ” mantra, and the requirement to spend 20% of your time on projects that aren’t specifically to do with any particular company goal (with the obvious intent that some of those projects will result in interesting discoveries and/or personal development that the company can use). But I can’t say that I’ll be applying there, at least until they publicly state that they are permanently reversing

(*) By “Unix”, I mean Linux, Unix, AIX, OS/X, and similar flavours. Way back when, about twenty or so years ago, I was a Unix admin, and a Unix developer. I had to be both, because I was the only person in the company who could spell Unix. My favourite game was to go along to presentations for Microsoft Windows ‘new features’ and say “Oh, but hasn’t Unix had that for the last twenty years?” Sure enough, there were countless things that Windows users and developers

A friend of mine ordered a Platinum Zune HD recently (that’s the 32GB model), and because he was unable to receive the shipment, asked for me to open it for him and check on its functionality to make sure he hadn’t been shipped a lemon. Since I’ve previously commented on the Zune 30 that my wife bought for my birthday, I thought I’d have a quick look and see what I like about it. The demonstration video is stunning , and shows off the display impressively. The display is wonderfully

How would you change your behaviour at work if you knew the person seated one desk over worked for a competitor? How would your behaviour change if you knew the person one cubicle over was about to work for a competitor? What if you knew that your cubicle neighbour was going to lose her job (be fired or laid off) in the next six months? Do you think she’d be looking to work in a different industry, or the one where she had the most recent experience? What if the economic situation was such that you

As we mentioned in the 1st part of this series , FTP is a more complex protocol than many, using one control connection and one data connection. A recap of the first post… In typical Stream Mode operation, a new data connection is opened and closed for each data transfer, whether that’s an upload, a download, or a directory listing. To avoid confusion between different data connections, and as a recognition of the fact that networks may have old packets shuttling around for some time, these connections

I’ve been wanting to post this comment for some time, but never seemed to get around to it. I’ve been through a number of different laptops over the last decade or so – Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and Toshiba – and each time, I’ve found that they just don’t seem to last. I can’t point to anything in particular – it’s never the same thing twice, but for one reason or another, I don’t get more than a couple of years’ life out of a laptop. Sometimes it’s physical failure – the screen breaks, the drive fails