At least today: xkcd from Friday.

We’re pretty sure everything this dude says is completely true. Read up.

Walt Mossberg is perhaps the most influential tech columnist around. He’s become less and less impressed with Microsoft for a while now; check this out:

I’m talking about two main problems. One is the plethora of teaser software and advertisements for products that must be cleared and uninstalled to make way for your own stuff. The second is the confusing welter of security programs you have to master and update, even on a virgin machine.

I’m also referring to how slowly a new Windows Vista machine starts and restarts, even if you haven’t yet loaded or launched any of your own software. […]

The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don’t act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products. […]

I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.

Perhaps this is why Paul Graham thinks Microsoft is not just doomed, but already dead.

This. Who knew he was so sensitive?

Via MeFi, we learn of the Pluto Project, a Cold War era weapon program. Sweet Christ, what a scary idea.

a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto’s designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto’s nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by.

Fortunately, it never got built; here’s part of why:

But what drove the last nail into Pluto’s coffin was a question so deceptively simple that the wizards at the lab might be excused for deliberately overlooking it: Where do you flight-test a nuclear reactor? “How are you going to convince people that it is not going to get away and run at low level through Las Vegas — or even Los Angeles?” asks Jim Hadley, a Livermore physicist and Pluto alumnus who now works on detecting foreign nuclear tests for the lab’s hush-hush Z Division. There was, admits Hadley, no way of guaranteeing that Pluto would not become a nuclear-powered juggernaut beyond its inventors’ control — a kind of airborne Frankenstein, a flying Chernobyl.

Every so often, it utterly blows our mind that we didn’t all end up dead during the nuclear brinksmanship era. Duck and cover our ass.

Hawesome:

We found an amusing phrase — “sheer apian ebullience” — on a marked page in an old notebook recently, so we plugged it into Google, and got a single page back, which was of course the article from which we copied the phrase. We still like it a lot:

It was well known that a bee that had located a source of food habitually returned home and performed an elaborate “waggle dance” that contained information about the direction and distance of the food from the hive. The vast majority of scientists assumed that conveying this information was the purpose of the dance: that the dance was, in effect, a form of bee language. Chomsky, however, disliked the notion that such a minimally evolved creature as a bee could have language, because language was, to him, distinctly human; he also disliked the implication that language in humans was, like the waggle dance, a skill that had evolved because it was useful. Chomsky had, accordingly, seized on the work of a maverick scientist, A. M. Wenner, who claimed that although humans could detect information from the dance, the bees themselves did not: they found their way to food using only odor.

“You can’t just assume that because something’s there it is functional, or has been adapted for,” Chomsky pointed out. “It could just be there. Crickets don’t chirp so you can enjoy the summer evening.” Crickets were a useful example for Chomsky, because scientists had managed to extract a lot of information from crickets’ noises, but there was no evidence to suggest that crickets themselves could interpret the noises, or showed any interest in doing so. Despite the cricket example, however, nobody seemed convinced. It seemed very unlikely that bees might perform an elaborate dance for no reason other than sheer apian ebullience.

(The New Yorker, “The Devil’s Accountant,” 3/31/2003, by Larissa MacFarquhar)

It’d be a good name for a band.

xkcd examines this important question.

Review PC World’s list of the Top 50 Technology Products of All Time, and figure out how many you had or used.

Of the 50, we have or have had most of them, especially if you count descendent products (*).

1. Netscape Navigator
2. Tivo (* our is a DirecTV/Tivo combo box)
3. Napster
4. Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS
5. Apple iPod (yes, an original one)
6. Hayes Smartmodem (* though ours was 2400 baud, not 300)
7. Moto Star-TAC (* we had a digital version)
8. WordPerfect 5.1. Wow.
9. Tetris.
10. Photoshop (* We had a copy a little later, around 96)
11. Thinkpad 700C (* We had a 560Z)
12. Atari VCS/2600
13. Mac Plus (* We’re Powerbook people, but we’ve damn sure used old-skool Macs.)
14. RIM Blackberry 857 (* We had a more recent iteration in 2004)
15. The first digital Elph
16. Palm Pilot 1000
17. Doom.
18. Win95
19. iTunes 4
20. Iomega Zip drive
21. WOW
22. PageMaker (* The version we used was in 1990)
23. HP LaserJet 4L (We only recently ditched it)
24. OS X
25. Nintendo NES
26. Eudora
27. Airport
28. Print Shop (* but on a PC, in 1987)
29. McAfee VirusScan
30. Sound Blaster
31. Hypercard
32. Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer
33. PC Tools (* our copy was verison 5)
34. Red Hat Linux
35. PC Talk
36. Excel. (Every Windows version since 1991.)
37. Northgate Omnikey Ultra. We wish we knew where ours was.

EMI has announced its intention to offer DRM-free downloads of its “entire digital repertoire” via the Apple iTunes Music Store.

EMI is one of the “big four,” along with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner, though they are the smallest by marketshare of that crowd (Universal: 31.71%; Sony/BMG: 25.61%; Warner: 15%; EMI: 9.55%, via WP). We’re betting this gets interesting.

(More at BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow is so happy he may have a seizure. The really odd part is that they’ll still sell the DRM versions, which are lower quality, for less money. Gee, which would you have? DRM’d crappy files for $X, or DRM-free high-quality files for 130% of X? It’s a no-brainer.)

More followup: Techdirt has more details: the higher-quality files will be 256Kbit AAC, which is both good and bad. AAC is undeniably a better algorithm than MP3, but so far it plays pretty much only on Apple equipment (it’s an adopted standard, though, not something Apple has locked up — other folks can use it if they want. (It’s the DRM, not the format, that Apple has refused to license in the past (HDANCN?).)). Techdirt also brings up something we didn’t catch: the new tracks are priced higher, which means Jobs backed off his “one price” mantra — or, rather, traded it for no-DRM. Furthermore, this “charge a premium for a more flexible offering” puts iTMS at odds with the usual RIAA play of “charge more for less” (ringtones still cost more than online tracks, for example). Guess who we think will win?

This is almost certainly the most limited-appeal post in the history of Heathen: STEEM is an Atari ST emulator for Windows and Linux. (MeFi)

Crochet a Dalek.

Via BB, we find this, which is totally Geek Nostalgia Central.

Extra points if you can tell us which occasional members of Heathen Nation owned which computers. Double extra points if you can name the onetime owners of Tandy Model Ones.

Some people have noticed that some impossible directions are possible at Google, such as New York to Dublin, or Stanford to Stockholm.

Researches at Oxford have created a Java-based DOS emulator. Anybody got a 5.25-inch floppy drive?

Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me.

Especially number 10.

Check out how Google moves LOTS of data.

YesButNoButYes has compiled the top 15 best unintentionally funny comic book panels ever, and you really really need to check ’em out. SFW.

We have decided that MiscHeathen needs a logo, because how else are we going to get custom Fezes made? Who wants to play designer?

Working in Project just now, it admonished me for repeatedly using the much-faster (but needlessly verbose) keyboard shortcut for indent/outdent (alt-p-o-i and alt-p-o-o), suggesting it might be faster to use buttons on the toolbar.

Think about that again. Project thinks it’s faster to take your hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to click a button than it is to hit a keystroke. Now, it’s manifestly stupid that the keystroke to engage two of the most common Project tasks is so fucking buried — seriously, FOUR keys? — but even that is faster than mousing. W. T. F?

Clearly, no one is left at Microsoft that understood how fast the last good version of Word was (5.0 for DOS, baby; we still have our disks somewhere), or why WordPerfect was kicking their ass pre-Windows, or why real programmers still use emacs or vi or other power editors with rich keyboard interfaces. Goons.

First: John Backus (Turing Award 1977) has joined the choir invisible. He was 82. He invented FORTRAN, and in so doing unlocked a significant chunk of computing’s potential.

Second: Don Knuth (Turing ’74) is pretty sure that his old pal Condi Rice is full of shit. The letter was sent in 2002; it’s only MORE valid today.

Please buy us a crater in New Zealand. Kthnxbi.

Dude, thanks to Sprint, we’re totally blogging from an airplane.

(Door’s still open. Calm down.)

They’re rolling out R2D2 mailboxes for the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. Hawesome!

Navy Developing Vomit Gun.

(Hi, Tom.)

Bruce has pointed out that there are a variety of sources for quasi-canonical lists of default router passwords.

Not that we’d ever use such a thing, of course.

Even so, this really is the best geek cake ever.

The Watchmen is perhaps the most important super-hero comic ever done. Alan Moore was on top of his game, and in our estimation even Miller‘s Dark Knight doesn’t quite represent the quantum leap Moore achieved with Watchmen.

And yet, in 20-odd years, nobody’s managed to do a film. In college, we used to say it was unfilmable, but still amuse ourselves over drinks with fantasy casting. As it happens, in 2007, you no longer need content yourselves with plans over booze; you can put your own segments on YouTube and let the world see what you’ve got. Apparently, there’s a real film in the works (but this has happened before); we only hope it’s as good as this tiny bit of fanfilm.

This is an excellent Linux command line tutorial.

Tired of the sad, modern silence of broadband connections? If you get one of these, you can relive the glory days of yesteryear by making your broadband router emit 2400 baud modem noises. Screeeeeeeeeetchtastic!

Our Lady of Geekiness Gina Trapani explains how to surf footloose and fancy-free via SOCKS. Also useful for securing coffee-shop net-surfing. Enjoy.

The responses to Steve Jobs’ “let’s abandon DRM” memo have been pretty amusing so far. The first one, from the RIAA itself, was Orwellian in its wrongness: they thanked Jobs for his offer to license FairPlay, which is actually something Jobs’ letter explicitly said was off the table. Good luck on that reading comprehension problem, doofuses.

Even more bizarre, though, was the response from the head of the DRM firm Macrovision; you know Macrovision; they’re the people who make it difficult to copy VHS tapes. Anyway, the response is a very model of PR bullshit, chock full of deliberate misstatements and outright lies, which is why we’re very happy that Jon Gruber over at Daring Fireball has provided a handy translation.

In Macrovision’s world, the solution is not to abandon DRM; it’s to make it universal, so that the content makers can charge you for a song you play on your iPod, and then charge you again to play it at home, and charge you a third time to use it for a ringtone. They don’t want you to ever actually own any content in the way we all now own and control CDs. We suspect they think they’ve hidden this goal in their response, but Gruber makes it very clear what their real goals are.

Watch this:

It’s video from a camera attached to one of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. It goes all the way down.

We’ve never heard of this dude before, but he lays down the law on web design. If you’re looking for a web site, read these rules, and immediately ignore anyone who tells you to break them.

Update: This was so widely linked that it appears Mr Cole’s site has been removed, hence the 404 you’re now getting. We’ll find a mirror, or he’ll recover. Sorry if you missed it! (Thanks for the head’s-up, Tom.)

Only a couple of you will get this, and most of those will have seen it already, but this is the best damn cartoon about Lisp we’ve ever seen.

Do not taunt happy fun drain.

Mike found a fantastic little video on the eternal frustrations of tech support. Watch.

Yes, that glorious time when we review some of the truly bizarre search strings that have brought the huddled masses to Heathen Central. January brought us these gems:

“giant gator”

Where? You go get Boudroux, and we’ll get the shotgun! Maw, we’re eatin’ tonight!

“anubis”

AKA “Jojo the Dog-faced God.” Technically a “heathen” search, we reckon, but a bit literal for our tastes.

“slutty women in buffalo ny no pros”

Dude, you’re in Buffalo looking for sluts. Don’t get all picky on us NOW. Also, this isn’t PointlessSexWithGrossPeople.com, so you’re kinda out of luck.

“hermione has boobs”

Allah Akbar, my man.

“independent fundamental baptist churches neat seabrook tx”

Um.

“hide town jeff miller”

He’s not here. I think he’s taking a Mexican nap.

“pope evil”

Well, he *was* a Nazi. But he’s not here, either. What part of “heathen” don’t you understand?

“badger paris hilton”

We think it’s more properly referred to as “beaver,” but whatever.

“horny heathen”

Aren’t we all?

“hypnotized lizards”

Not THAT horny, though. You’re sick, dude.

“real yetis”

See above re: Buffalo. Though the one about lizards may apply, too, depending on your intentions with said yeti-americans.

“precis caucasian chalk circle”

Ah, the obligatory “Please do our homework for us, Mr Heathen” search. No.

“houston theater naughty sexy comedy”

See above, re: “Hide Town”

“hdancn”

You bet your ass.

The inimitable Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a twice-a-month podcast of classical music played in the museum’s intimate tapestry room. Seriously, check this out.

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review (at SuicideGirls; typically SFW) this week is a wonderful nostalgia trip about that endangered suburban creature, the Video Arcade. Check it out.

(He’s got excerpts at his blog in case your pointy-headed IT drones have SG blocked.)

We’re not sure he’s ever said anything remotely accurate about technology; Daring Fireball takes him to task about his most recent absurd pronouncements in re: the as-yet-unreleased iPhone, but we’ll go a little point-by-point here because it’s fun to pull wings off flies like Rob.

From the linked story:

Image-conscious executives who want to own the latest tech gadgets might put their companies at risk if they try to connect iPhones to corporate networks, warns an analyst

Yes, it’s possible some execs will have trouble connecting the iPhone to their corporate mail, but only because many corporate mail servers are proprietary (Notes, Exchange) instead of standards-based (POP, IMAP), but there’s no evidence at all that successful attempts to do so will result in “risk.” The article, by the way, lists none to back up this assertion; it’s a total bullshit lede.

To guard against such eventualities, IT departments should begin drafting policies forbidding executives from connecting their Apple iPhones to company networks, said Rob Enderle, a principal analyst with the Enderle Group based in San Jose, Calif.

We wonder, as does DF, what other analysts work at this “Group”.

“The device isn’t secure enough, nor is it designed to run with corporate systems,” he said.

We have no idea how he knows if the device is “secure enough,” since none have been released for testing. Since it’s currently a closed platform with no software channel other than Apple, it strikes us as a pretty unlikely vector for attack at this point. Nothing else is knowable, which means Enderle is talking out of his ass.

Companies spend a lot of time getting RIM and Palm handheld devices up to par so they can be secure enough to connect to company e-mail, he said.

Really? Are you sure, Rob? Because I’ve done these things, and have seen no evidence of any such time investment. Blackberry integration with closed back-end systems involves an (expensive) add-on server, that’s true, but if your company uses IMAP or POP, there’s basically ZERO effort required to connect these tools. They exist as just another mail client. Mail clients, with the enormous exception of Outlook, are not typically virus vectors or security risks.

Before the iPhone is as secure as the BlackBerry and Treo, it needs a product such as Good Technology Mobile, which is designed to securely deliver enterprise applications to mobile devices. But now that Good Technology has been bought by Motorola, it’s unclear whether it’d be interested in creating a product for Apple’s iPhone, Enderle said.

Aaaaah, now we see the thrust of the article, if it can be called that. We Heathen aren’t exactly technological neophytes, and here’s the news: We’ve never heard of this “Good Technology Mobile.” We suspect, therefore, that this bit is actually a thinly veiled press release on their behalf, set up by Enderle.

Think of it this way: Execs with Mobile Device X typically want only a few functions.

• Phone, first and foremost
• Email
• The ability to view Office attachments
• Synced calendar and address book

All of these functions are CORE attributes of the Treo and the Blackberry, and are expected to be available on the iPhone. No additional software is required. We suspect that 99.9% of Blackberry users never bother adding any additional software, and that this percentage is only a little lower for the Palm-based Treo (which has a long tradition of add-on gadgets, games, and such dating back to its launch as a non-phone PDA in 1996).

The idea that corporations need some “secure channel” to control software installation on these gadgets is therefore absurd on its face. There’s very little business need to do so for the vast majority of users, and even in cases where it’s needed, the installation is trivial. We’re sure, of course, that some clueless IT directors will seize on this opportunity to control MORE systems, but the need really just isn’t there.

Leaving all that aside, though, remember this: the iPhone is closed. This means nobody but Apple can sell you software for it. Daring Fireball addresses this very well:

Enderle and Khanna are arguing that the iPhone is insecure because it doesn’t (at least yet) allow for third-party software, which means you can’t install third-party software designed to let you securely install additional third-party software.

Seriously, what the hell?

Enderle even invokes the corporate boogeyman du jour:

But because of the iPhone’s attractive form factor, executives are likely to start buying it when it becomes available in June in the U.S., and tech departments need to head them off at the pass by issuing policies that forbid iPhones from being connected to networks, Enderle said.

If executives insist on connecting iPhones, then the IT department has a duty to report the violation since it could mean that Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance rules have been broken, Enderle said.

We figure RIM must be paying him as much as these “Good Technology” people for a remark like that. He’s not established in any meaningful sense how the as-yet-hypothetical iPhone might constitute a security problem, but he’s already banging the drum to get it banned by corporate fiat. We’re pretty sure we all know how well edicts like that are typically followed; since we’re talking about execs with money to burn on fancy gadgets, we’re probably also talking about people who can cheerfully flaunt whatever bullshit regulations the IT director pushes — after all, if the money-printing sales VP wants the iPhone, odds are he’s gonna get it.

Furthermore, we’re unsure where SarBox mandates RIM- or Treo-only mobile devices in corporate America, so we’re also not sure exactly what “violations” Enderle is talking about.

Again: Why the hell do people keep listening to this jackass? He’s made it abundantly obvious over the years that he cares far more about slamming Apple (and the Open Source world, another favorite target) than he cares about being right or the truth. Virtually nothing we’ve read of his can withstand even basic scrutiny; he’s like a weird Bizarro-world FUD machine, constantly shilling for Microsoft, SCO, and doing anything he can to pull down Open Source and Apple. Worse, a cursory review of his history will also show that he has no compunctions about making pronouncements and predictions in favor of paying clients, which you’d think would pretty much sunder his credibility, and yet here he is again, babbling about the iPhone.

Dear tech media: Please stop quoting this dork. Thanks.

Here’s an excellent visual summary of why Apache on Linux is and will probably always be more secure (and faster) than Microsoft’s IIS.

Got a hankerin’ for some old-skool Mac goodness? Got an extra USB thumbdrive? They’ve got just the thing, and it’s all free.

We’re pretty sure we need to bail on the fools at GoDaddy, especially in light of the news summarized at NoDaddy.com; here’s a cut-and-paste, sans the links. You should go check it out if you have domains:

On January 24, 2007, I (Fyodor) woke up to find that my domain registrar, GoDaddy, had suspended one of my most popular domains (SecLists.Org) because MySpace objected to content posted by some user to a mailing list which SecLists archives. They didn’t give me a chance to dispute or resolve the problem — just a voicemail saying my domain was “scheduled for suspension”, followed up by a Domain Suspension Notice exactly 52 seconds later. Note that neither of these included a phone number for the abuse department or a reason for the shutdown. It took many hours of phone calls (to general support) and emails (to the abuse department) before they even gave me the reason for the shut down, and fixing the problem took longer still. You can read the full details here. One thing I forgot to mention in that email is the secret phone number to their abuse department: +1 480-624-2505.

Note that SecLists was never hosted by GoDaddy. They were just our registrar, whose job is to maintain a list of the 18 million domains their customers own and the corresponding name servers. They aren’t the web content police and shouldn’t go suspending domains at MySpace’s behest without a court order.

Even after this episode made news worldwide, GoDaddy refused to admit they were wrong. In a News.Com article, GoDaddy general counsel Christine Jones “pointed out that GoDaddy’s terms of service say the company ‘reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.'” In that same article, Jones refuses to rule out suspending a site such as News.Com if a reader posts illegal information in a discussion forum. In another article, Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen catches Jones in a lie. When Kevin notes that GoDaddy shut down the domain only 52 seconds after leaving the voicemail, not one hour as Jones previously claimed, Jones “admits she doesn’t know exactly how much notice [Fyodor] had” and declares that “I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous”. Is this the sort of company you would hire to manage your domain names? This could happen to any site which allows reader comments or other user generated content.

In re: Vista, there are bears in those woods.

A bit:

I fiddled with a few file and folder permissions (initially it had been read-only), but couldn’t get the directory listing to tell me the truth. Puzzled, i tried opening the file with Notepad, and fell headlong into some kind of parallel universe: the changed content was gone, and the file had reverted to its original content. What?!? I went back and opened it again with the original editor: my changes were there, just as i made them. I opened it with Notepad, then Wordpad: my changes were gone.

The answer to the puzzle is one of the creepiest “features” we’ve ever heard of, and proof positive that MS is utterly ignorant in matters of user expectations.

The floppy disk is dead. If anything, it outlived its usefulness. We haven’t carried a laptop with a floppy since 1997 or 1998 (a Dell, if memory serves; a superslim no-internal-removable-drives IBM followed before we jumped to our first Powerbook in 2000 or so). In other words, 9 or 10 years, and NOW it’s a story?

What we really like about the linked story is the error message they’ve pictured. If you recognize it, you’re really geeky.

Take a look at what the boys in Redmond want to do with Vista’s follow-up: basically, charge for every little aspect of the OS, and ensure you have no control of the hardware YOU paid for.

We remind you at this time that OS X is far more open, and that Linux is actually both free and Free:

The message is clear. Get out while you can. Microsoft’s only interest is to empty your pockets and keep your computer hostage. It wants to turn computing into a monopoly content distribution channel and sell you to the highest bidder. Choose freedom and switch to Free/Open-source software.

Somehow, we missed the fact that, back in the 80s, Superman got hypnotized and forced to do porn. We are not making this up. Link SFW. Just creepy.

So, Second Life, a weird sort of massively multiplayer game, has been getting an awful lot of press and hype lately, which led some pranksters to create GetAFirstLife.com, a somewhat obvious but still funny satire site.

The fun part is what comes next. In the comments of the parody site, they jokingly invite the almost-inevitable-today “Cease and Desist” letter from Second Life’s publisher, Linden Lab. That’s kind of funny.

Funnier, though, is that Linden Lab replied in order to reject the invitation. In part:

We do not believe that reasonable people would argue as to whether the website located at http://www.getafirstlife.com/ constitutes parody – it clearly is. Linden Lab is well known among its customers and in the general business community as a company with enlightened and well-informed views regarding intellectual property rights, including the fair use doctrine, open source licensing, and other principles that support creativity and self-expression. We know parody when we see it.

Moreover, Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody. Indeed, any competent attorney is well aware that the outcome of sending a cease-and-desist letter regarding a parody is only to draw more attention to such parody, and to invite public scorn and ridicule of the humor-impaired legal counsel. Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception.

In conclusion, your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected.

Nice move. They get it. Now, to educate the rest of corporate America.