Joey makes some great points over at GlobalNerdy. He starts with this Paul Graham quote:

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

It’s still very true. The balance of his post is a rundown of named “Web 2.0” firms, together with their apparent server choices. It is Linux, not Windows, that runs Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Wikipedia, and a long list of others. The only top-tier site surveyed on Windows is MySpace, which explains the site’s legendary instability.

Global Nerdy summarizes the major Laws of Software Development. Yes, Greg, Brooks is there.

(Brooks, for the nonnerdy among you, is Fred Brooks, who wrote (in 1975!) The Mythical Man Month, one of the seminal texts on software development. In it, he formalized his eponymous law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. It is counterintuitive, disturbing to management, and absolutely true.)

There’s a small story on the net this week about the FBI cracking a bomb-threat hoaxer over the Internet. The kid made false threats about bombs in his high school and got caught, and is now serving 90 days in juvie.

None of that is disturbing. Stupid kid, stupid idea, but mild sentence because, well, he’s a kid. In this climate, he’s lucky he didn’t get sent to Gitmo, given that the Executive has made clear it believes it can do anything it wants to anybody it wants, but that’s not what this post was about.

The kid was taken up in what’s been called the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which basically means online anonymity makes people act like assholes sometimes. He’d managed to get access to a compromised computer in Italy, which is where he was sending his threat mails from. This implies he was using a botnet, or at least had access to one. Again, not surprising. However, here’s where the story gets weird, and raises some legitimate questions.

The FBI sought and got permission to install, via messaging, a virus on the kid’s computer to aid their sleuthing. It was this virus that allowed them to find the kid. The questions this raises are interesting:

• How’d they get their virus on his computer?
• Why didn’t the kid’s anti-virus/anti-spyware tools catch the Feds’ virus?

The first answer is more or less apparent in the article; it got there via some messaging protocol, probably email. Everybody knows Windows is a joke security-wise, but most folks — even kids — have the message at this point that clicking weird shit you get in email is a bad idea. So there’s still some mystery here. Perhaps the Feds did just assume he’d be running IE and Outlook; it’s not out of the question.

The second answer is scarier. We can assume the kid had at least some technical knowledge, since he was using a botnet, so why didn’t his AV software catch the Feds? The possibilities are that either the Feds know about a Windows exploit nobody else knows about (either because they found it and are mum, or because someone built them a back door), or they’ve strong-armed AV makers into whitelisting their pet virus.

In the first case, they’re compromising everyone’s security by sitting on an exploit they think is theirs alone. It’s the responsibility of everyone in computing to alert software makers when flaws are found; the stakes on nefarious intrusion get higher every day, and the notion that this exploit will remain the exclusive province of law enforcement is simply laughable.

In the second case, it’s much creepier. If we paid Norton for a package to protect our machine from malware, we don’t want them to be in the business of whitelisting spybots just because the government says they’re ok. Either detect everything we might not want on the PC, or don’t represent yourself as protection. “Trust the government not to misbehave” is a nonstarter, as is the old “nothing to hide” argument.

Anyway, News.com surveyed several AV makers this week, and all said it was their “general policy to detect police spyware. Some, however, indicated they would obey a court order to ignore policeware, and neither McAfee nor Microsoft would say whether they’d received such a court order.”

The implications are clear: You cannot trust commercial malware-detection vendors. We know trusting governments is a bad idea. The only real option is to use a real secure OS — something Unix-based — and seek open-source solutions to security problems. We doubt the Open Source community will be particularly compliant when the cops come calling for backdoors or whitelists.

We may have covered this before, but Mrs Heathen was wondering “how long will the power last in the event of a catastrophic mankind-eliminating event?”

Well, this is awful close to Straight Dope’s answer to “When the zombies take over, how long ’til the electricity fails?” Cecil covers both sudden and gradual zombification. Sadly, the answer in both cases is “not very long,” though obviously we do rather better in a gradual scenario. Coal plants require nearly constant activity to keep creating power[1], and they form a big chunk of the grid. Add to this the inter-relatedness of the whole affair, and you can see how the failure of a few coal-fired plants could bring down entire regions, if not more.

[1. Yes, we know they’re not “creating power.” They’re actually converting matter to energy. Shut up.]

BoingBoing points us to the story of the Menacing Battery Charger. Briefly, a man used a kit to build a two-D-cell charger for his iPod so he could watch more videos on his iPod when flying. TSA goons freak out because “it looks like an IED,” despite thorough checks yielding no trace of explosive residue. They also attempt to confiscate his laser pointer. Police are called, TSA is smacked down, and the writer notes the terrible truth of the situation:

They wouldn’t have grasped that the spare battery for my laptop was far more dangerous than the iPod charger. A dead short of the MintyBoost! would produce a little heat (maybe 4 watts total), a dead short of the laptop battery would likely cause an explosion of the battery…. and I had two of them fully charged.

He continues:

A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer?

(We need to get one of these chargers, TSA trouble or no. Sounds like a great device.)

We’ve finally found a use for the Opera browser!

We’ve always sort of ignored this also-ran in the Browser Wars, largely because their market share is negligible, and Firefox is so good and so free. However, on our phone, the Pocket version of IE just sucks rocks, and fails when we try to do some Important Work online.

As it happens, though, Opera plays Travian just fine.

43-Man Squamish, a sport designed to be unplayable. Under “Participants,” we find:

Each team consists of one left and one right Inside Grouch, one left and one right Outside Grouch, four Deep Brooders, four Shallow Brooders, five Wicket Men, three Offensive Niblings, four Quarter-Frummerts, two Half-Frummerts, one Full-Frummert, two Overblats, two Underblats, nine Back-Up Finks, two Leapers and a Dummy — for a total of 43.

The game officials are a Probate Judge (dressed as a British judge, with wig), a Field Representative (in a Scottish kilt), a Head Cockswain (in long overcoat), and a Baggage Smasher (dressed as a male beachgoer in pre-World War I years). None has any authority after play has begun.

Gameplay is described thusly:

Before any game, the Probate Judge must first flip a coin, usually a new Spanish peseta, while the Visiting Captain guesses the toss. If he guesses correctly, the game is cancelled immediately. If not, the Home Team Captain must then decide if he wishes to play offense or defense first. Play begins after a frullip is touched to the flutney and the recitation “My uncle is sick but the highway is green!” is intoned in Spanish. Penalties are applied for infractions such as walling the Pritz, icing on fifth snivel, running with the mob, rushing the season, inability to face facts, and sending the Dummy home early.

The offensive team has five Snivels (equivalent to downs in football) to advance to the enemy goal. Carrying the Pritz across the goal line is a Woomik and scores 17 points; hitting it across with the frullip counts as a Durmish and only scores 11 points. Except in the 7th Ogre (and the 8th, if it rains), only the offensive Niblings and Overblats are allowed to score. In this case, the four Quarter-Frummerts are allowed to kick or throw the Pritz, and the nine Finks are allowed to heckle the opposition by doing imitations of Barry Goldwater.

In a particularly fun Buffy episode, a one-shot character states, offhandedly, that she’d done her thesis on one of the recurring vampire characters.

Today, JWZ points out that someone has written that thesis.

Internet Jesus (a/k/a Warren Ellis) points out TheVeidtMethod.com, the supposed web site of a firm owned by Adrian Veidt. Advance marketing, maybe, for a film of the least filmable comic ever? Perhaps:

$ whois theveidtmethod.com
Domain name: theveidtmethod.com

Registrant Contact:
   Type40 Internet Marketing and Promotion
   Michael Regina (xoanon78@hotmail.com)
   +1.5149475221
   Fax: 1.
   42 Marcel Meloche
   Kirkland, QC H9J1K6
   CA

Also, Wikipedia thinks there’s a 2008 film in the works.

Some terribly, terribly nerdy man contracted with one of the Bunny Ranch, um, “providers” to fabricate and wear a sexy Stormtrooper outfit for a date. And there’s video. Probably not SFW, but more for subject matter reasons than anything else; the nudity is pixelated.

Joey sums it up: This Light Switch Might Explain A Lot About Java.

Why? Because WE aren’t the ones who searched for, found, purchased, and meticulously restored the Camaro from Better Off Dead. It kind of hurts us to realize that gap between “when the car was new” (’66/’67) and “when they made the movie” (’85) is shorter than “when they made the movie” and “now.”

(Very cool. Via MeFi.)

Searching for content management systems for a client, we ran across this lovely but potentially unworksafe blog post: Content Management Systems I Would or Wouldn’t Fuck. Heh.

Apparently, there exists a Jack Kirby comic adaptation of 2001.

Best rejected Wii games. Heh.

BoingBoing reports that, back in the 80s, some record labels and bands jumped on the nascent computer bandwagon in a big and very geeky way, by putting the binary audio of a computer game on a flexi-disc record. Sufficiently geeky fans could then dub the record onto a cassette, which they’d then load into their computers (typically, Sinclairs).

Wacky.

Barring the introduction of magic, we are never going to do interstellar colonization.

This isn’t exactly news, but this time it’s presented in a way that’s both entertaining and accessible.

Via Slashdot, we find this excellent deconstruction of the bad math behind many so-called “hard” tests.

As one who took several medical licensure and specialist exams, and the Virginia bar exam, passing all, I might be inclined to pat myself on the back, but my former background as a mathematician won’t let me do that. I do remember, however, some remarks from a noted orthopedic surgeon about his own specialty exam: “It was a hellishly hard test, and went on for hours,” he said, “but I’m really glad I passed the first time I took it. Only about 35 percent who took it passed the exam.”

He was describing, with only the slightest tinge of boastfulness, the qualifying exam for specialists in orthopedic surgery. Passing the exam entitled one to join the “college” of orthopedic surgeons, and list oneself as specialist.

“Was it all multiple choice?” I asked. “And how did they grade it?” I was thinking of my own exams. “Did they count only the right answers.?”

When he said Yes to all the questions questions, I did not have the heart to tell him what I knew as a mathematical certainty–that the exam was, like most graduate medical exams, and large parts of legal licensing bar exams in most states , virtually a complete fraud.

Ouch. What the author is driving at is simple: unless there’s some penalty for guessing, “very hard” tests aren’t good measures of anything. This, as you may recall, was a key difference in scoring between the SAT and the ACT at one time (and may still be).

Once again, someone asks “how long before prosthetics can exceed original equipment?” It’s a valid question for Jamais Cascio, who’s just been fitted for hearing aids:

These aren’t just dumb amplifiers; they’re little digital signal processors, small enough to fit into the ear canal, and smart enough to know when to boost the input and when to leave it alone. They’re programmable, too (sadly, not by the end-user — programming requires an acoustic enclosure, not just a computer connection). And here’s where therapeutic augmentation starts to fuzz into enhancement: one of the program modes I’m considering would give me far better than normal hearing, allowing me to pick up distant conversations like I was standing right there…

I expect that, over the next decade, hearing aid technologies will have improved enough that most of the drawbacks will have been rectified, and I’ll have access to hearing capabilities better than ever before; over that same time, we may see biomedical advances that can fix deficient hearing, restoring perfectly functional natural hearing. Augmentation for therapy slides inexorably into augmentation for enhancement. Should I give up my better-than-human hearing to go back to a “natural” state?

Best comic panel evar.

Software development is a terribly arcane art. Among the more advanced techniques is, of course, Abject-Oriented Programming.

Check this out, from TED; Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates an interesting new way to use and manipulate photographs on the web:

Check this out.

How to Make Thermite. This is just the sort of thing we’d have done in high school, if there’d been a public Internet back then. Of course, we’d have used better music.

(Mind the annoying ad.)

Notice a boatload of unsecured Wifi networks from your living room? Why not use all of them at once with this delightfully nefarious device?

Here’s an oldie but a goodie.

So, the BBC was absurdly stupid and alarmist on some “Wifi Expose” thing, right? Wellington Grey addresses it.

Slashdot: 49 of 50 surveyed WordPress blogs vulnerable to hacks.

Haven’t you wondered how you might blow up the earth?

In case you ever need to know this: you can create modern “soft-wrapped” text in Emacs using this technique. So far, it’s working rather well.

Or “Fun with an SR-71.” Enjoy.

BoingBoing points us to Spamtrap, an arts installation wherein spam is collected, downloaded, printed, and shredded.

He’s down on the term “Digital Rights Management,” preferring instead “Digital Consumer Enablement” on the theory that if you call it something else, nobody will notice that it sucks:

Digital rights management (DRM) is the wrong term for technology that secures programmers’ content as it moves to new digital platforms says HBO Chief Technology Officer Bob Zitter, since it emphasized restrictions instead of opportunities.

Speaking at a panel session at the NCTA show in Las Vegas Tuesday, Zitter suggested that “DCE,” or Digital Consumer Enablement, would more accurately describe technology that allows consumers “to use content in ways they haven’t before,” such as enjoying TV shows and movies on portable video players like iPods.

Hey Bob? Bullshit. Music is going DRM-free already; it’s only a matter of time before video follows suit. DRM has already failed in software, and will certainly fail with music and video. We suspect you’re more of a numbskull marketing droid than an actual technologist, and that you don’t actually understand what you’re talking about, but that doesn’t excuse the outright dissembling nature of this decidedly Orwellian coinage.

Via Kottke, about Korean tightrope walkers crossing the Han river alone.

Over at Binary Dollar, we here the tale of how πR² saves money at the pizza parlor.

We do this all the time, Mrs Heathen’s teasing notwithstanding. How else can you know whether two 8″ pizzas are a better deal than one 12″? (Note for Aggies: Do not count slices.)

The number in question is the 16-digit decryption key to the new HD DVD copy protection scheme. The MPAA is having fits about the crack, and is issuing takedown notices very widely. However, since information wants to be free, it’s a little late for that. The geek world has made it pretty clear that they intend to disseminate the number as widely as possible no matter what the lawyers say. Follow the BB link and read the whole bit from the EFF on how absurd — and sad — this situation is.

How can a number become illegal?

We just got 88% on the Spidey Villain Quiz over at MSNBC, which means we missed only 2: the show James Franco was originally on, and which Spidey nemesis alter-egos have made cameos in the films so far.

The quiz rewards knowledge of the mid-80s Secret Wars storyline (and subsequent events) a bit heavily, but that’s understandable based on the current Spider-context.

Also, we’re particularly amused by question 15 and its potential answers:

In the movie, Sandman’s name is Flint Marko. But in the comics, “Flint Marko” is only an alias that Sandman began using so that his mother would never know he had turned to a life of crime. What is his real name?

A. Wesley Dodds

B. Mark Sandman

C. Neil Gaiman

D. William Baker

LolTrek. (Widely linked.)

If the aforementioned number is illegal, then presumably this domain is, too, as are this tattoo and these colors.

Mark Pilgrim explains why Silverlight and Apollo are useless dead-end ghettos.

On an online forum we frequent, someone just posted about a frustrating time they had trying to get a Linksys home router working for a friend. The writer is a Mac person through-and-through, but had been convinced to spend half the cash and get a Linksys router instead of a fancy Airport Extreme, since they do effectively the same jobs. (Actually, the Linksys is typically more capable, but that’s irrelevant for most users.)

Well, there’s a complication now to this whole affair that is clearly the work of pointy-haired jerkoff marketing drones: the instructions to Linksys routers (and, we presume, D-link and NetGear) now include a step to install software, which of course naive and nontechnical users attempt to do. And that’s where the problem surfaces.

Routers like these have, since their initial introduction in the home market, included very full-featured (and simple!) web-based configuration tools. Anyone on the router’s network with the router’s address and the password (both printed on the documentation) can configure it to behave any way they want. No software is required at the PC level at all to configure the router, and no router-specific software is ever be required at the PC level to simply USE a given network. You DO need a network card and drivers for said, but for the last 10 years or so these have typically been included with every PC and Mac sold. It’s an industry standard, and this interoperability is a key part of why networks have become so popular and pervasive.

What this means is that for pretty much every router on the market, a user can unbox it, throw the CD away without unsealing the envelope, plug it in, and start using it immediately. They would be well served to adjust the router to improve security — changing the password to the web console is mandatory; setting the router so that only users connected by wire can use the management console is also a great idea — but the baseline function and factory configuration of pretty much every consumer router we’ve seen since 2000 has been such that “plug it in and go” will work just fine. A simple sheet of instructions walking the user through the advisable configuration changes is really all the “installation” such a machine needs.

Instead of embracing this altogether tremendous boon — really, how common is this sort of ease in technology? — Linksys, et. al., have added a wholly useless step that, in our experience, is the cause of 90%+ of all home-network configuration problems. (And we get calls. Trust us.) We’ve fixed innumerable home network setups by ignoring the “setup” program, going straight to “New Network Connection,” and accepting the defaults.

Oddly, the one home router we can think of that actually DOES require special software for administration comes from an unlikely source: Apple. The Airport doesn’t, at last count, have a web console, and therefore requires the Airport Administration Utility for configuration and control. This is a pretty huge misstep for Apple that for some reason they have yet to correct. It’s pretty bizarre when hardcore nerd companies like Linksys can present a better out-of-box experience than the masters in Cupertino. (It’s also still funny that Airports do less and cost more than the other-brand equivalents from the geek triumvirate of Linksys/DLink/Netgear, and probably justify this price bump on “usability” grounds.)

So, can anybody tell us just exactly what the hell these companies are thinking with this bullshit install step? Seriously, why shoot themselves in the foot like this? Whisky Tango Foxtrot, people?

Update: RN from Portland writes:

A native app can configure your machine’s networking so that it can find the network device. That’s a good reason to have to install something from a CD.

We disagree. First, configuring one’s own machine is distinct from configuring the router, which is what we’re really talking about here.

Second, even if local configuration is the router company’s bag, including instructions to create a new network profile, or use your machine’s “automatic” setting, is a far better plan than insisting on some baroque package that requires installation, together with all the bullshit that entails on Windows (it’s merely annoying and unnecessary on Macs).

In the Apple world, finding a new basic networking device is bone simple — Macs all have an “Automatic” profile included by default in the Network locations list. Even if the user isn’t set to use it when they install the router, making the change requires only 3 clicks.

Dell has announced that it will install and support Ubuntu Linux in addition to Windows. Add this to their earlier announcement that they’ll continue to install XP after Redmond’s target Vista-only date, and you begin to get a picture of a certain software empire beginning to lose its stranglehold on the PC world.

Cory over at BoingBoing points us to Voce, a high-end wireless carrier. Ordinarily, we’d dismiss the whole idea, but this time it’s not quite so laughable as a blinged-out Vertu.

They’re targeting the rich and status-conscious (n.b. that truly awful all-Flash website), but the actual terms of the deal are interesting to anyone with serious cell needs:

• $500 one-time setup fee (well, that part kind of bites);
• $200 a month for unlimited calling, messaging, directory assistance, etc.;
• A live-person 24×7 concierge/PA service that will answer any question or request that can be handled by phone or web;
• Free loaner phones for international travel (Mr Acosta! Check this out!);
• All phones are fully insured against loss or theft; just call ’em and they’ll send you a new one, apparently;
• Aside from that, you can upgrade phones every 12 months for no cost.

There’s definitely some extra cash floating around in this deal, but the monthly fees alone don’t represent a huge premium over a heavy voice plan with a data package. $500 setup is steep, but a new Treo 680 (which would be free with Voce) would be $299 at Cingular with a 2-year contract. Voce is contract-free.

Wil Wheaton reminisces about Cons. SFW, probably, but it’s a column at SuicideGirls.

The entire Blackberry/RIM service is down because of a failure at Blackberry.

Such a centralized point of failure is prima facie a bad idea, and is almost never acceptable in Information Technology, but it’s how Blackberrys work. Your mail goes from your server to THEIR server, and only then over the air to the device. There’s an extra step there that makes no sense.

The Heathen preferred wireless email plan involves a smarter device (a Treo, but Windows Mobile devices are also capable) and a smarter connection (such that the device can just reach over the Internet to the right mail server), so that for us email goes directly from our server to our handheld with no middleman. Simpler is better, and is also CLEARLY more robust.

xkcd explains.

Perhaps you should optimize your sandwich provider protocol.

Living Between Wednesdays now has a “review the hot superheros” feature. It’s really only sustainable because the author is a woman (or, rather, because the author is attracted to dudes), given the gender balance in the meta-human world, but how can you go wrong with a phrase like “We can also assume that he’s tapped a considerable amount of interplanetary ass?” We’ll tell you: you can’t. Enjoy.

Via MeFi, we discover that the Wikipedia article on Lightsaber Combat is very, very, very detailed.

Keep in mind that none of this is actually explored or defined in the actual films.

We here at Amalgamated Heathen are working to provide you with quality timewasting resources. Accordingly, we now introduce — and by “introduce” we mean “notice and then tell you about” — this feed from our Flickr pool, which is comprised entirely of crappy photos we take with our Treo and then email to Flickr after attaching captions we think of as funny. Or something. Anyway, you need a feed-reader to enjoy this properly; the actual HTML link for the same information is here, but that’s not nearly as geeky.

Mostly, we notice we’re taking more of these for some reason — probably the travel — so we thought we’d share more aggressively.

Coming soon: HeathenTwitter!