Posted 11/05/2009 at 07:58:48am

I used an earlier version of Paragon for a while, but I eventually concluded that it was "slightly flakey" - just a little bit to complex for its own good, not quite transparent enough in its controls and settings, and only 99% reliable where it needs to be 99.96% reliable.

I've also moved to a linux backup solution - dd for the MBR, partition table, and Luks partitions, tar for ext3, and ntfsclone for NTFS. I sleep alot better at night.

Posted 10/27/2009 at 04:20:52pm

This "you have a copy of XP, so you are fine" argument only works for your first Windows 7 install.

 In the course of my legitimate ownership of a Windows XP Upgrade (from a legal copy of Windows 98), I have done a fresh reinstall because of a hard drive failure, a fresh reinstall because of a motherboard upgrade, and a fresh reinstall just because I built up to much runtime crap over the course of several years of normal use. Each of these actions is perfectly legit under the non-OEM license.

Microsoft's new "you must install and activate and install XP first" would have added a large amount of pointless effort to each of these steps. And, one day, if I upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows whatever, does Microsoft expect me to install 3 operating systems?

Someone in Redmond just isn't thinking ahead about all the ways that their product is (legally) used.

Posted 10/27/2009 at 09:49:51am

Personally, I canceled my pre-order of Office 7 Progessional Upgrade when I read about this "cannot do a clean install" nonsense, and I will continue to run XP into the indefinite future. Microsoft really screwed the paying customer on this one.

I am glad to see that the hack is easy to explain and to execute. I hope Microsoft has the good sense to see their mistake and not to try to nerf this in a WGA update or in Windows 7 SP 1.

Posted 10/12/2009 at 08:53:12am

Both Trademark and Copyright are usually enforced by civil actions, which means that if the holder doesn't sue you, there's no enforcement.

 Trademarks have this additional problem that if the holder "lets something slide" and fails to enforce their rights, they can lose the trademark altogether. Copyright doesn't have this issue.

 It should be pointed out that there are criminal penalties in the US copyright law, so the United States DOJ can take you to court and throw you in jail. This usually happens in situations like pirate DVD rings.

Posted 05/15/2009 at 02:15:10pm

The problem with the Time article is that it is really the big failures of the last few years, not the entire decade. The entire decade includes the collapse of the dot com bubble.

On this scale, YouTube is a success story, because they got bought by a big guy for a premium price. Compare this to Beyond.Com and all those other companies that just plain evaporated, or even the big players that collapsed into insignificance and got bought at discount, like SGI, Lucent, Nortel, et cetera. And, let's not forget America Online . . .

Windows Vista is a failure, but if the timescale is the entire decade, then we have to talk about Windows Me. Windows Me is ten times the disaster of Windows Vista.

Microsoft Windows Security, collectively, belongs on the list.  All the viruses, worms, and just plain stupid design decisions (macros in word documents, automatic opening of attachments, ActiveX) were a collective disaster for the IT community and the world.

Posted 05/12/2009 at 07:20:25pm

Sony is beyond redemption. We can only hope that they drown in a pile of unsold CDs.

Posted 05/05/2009 at 02:47:10pm

It's also worth pointing out that industrial strength filesystem encryption is built right into Linux 2.6 kernels. If you don't set up your crypttab for automatic "ask for the key and then mount," then the only way someone is going to locate the data is to hunt around the hard disk and find the LUKS partition or the LUKS image file.

You can encrypt your entire root filesystem and encrypt your swap space, which pretty much handles the problem of leaving unencrypted traces of your data.

BTW - does anyone out there trust Bitlocker?

Posted 04/28/2009 at 02:31:42pm

Another option is an unofficial registry hack that is discussed at  http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/889747 . 

The hack in question (remove the string AUTORUN.INF from the registry) is somewhat extreme, but it does leave one with a stronger assurance that Microsoft didn't accidentally leave another back door to their "NoDriveTypeAutoRun" registry key or the various tweaks that change it.

Posted 04/22/2009 at 01:29:59pm

In response to the previous comment, I would point out that the vast majority of computer purchasers (consumer or business) aren't doing things that are "CPU Bound." They're running plain old Microsoft Office, Web Browsing, and maybe a little bit of streaming multimedia, and the sum of their "experience" has alot more to do with network speed, RAM capacity, RAM bandwidth, and disk drive speed than it has to do with Instructions Per Second. They seldom run close to 100% of their CPU for any significant length of time.

For this type of customer, there's no "future proof" from just a fast processor. By the time you hit the wall on the latest release of Microsoft Bloatware, you have enough slow components in the system that the whole thing will need replacement anyway. This is also why just a CPU upgrade is seldom an effective fix for an old, slow PC, even if there's a significantly faster part that can fit in the existing motherboard.

 If you are buying 1,000 desktops for Microsoft Office, the extra $300 for cpu cycles that will never be called upon is a giant waste of money.

Posted 03/30/2009 at 01:35:09pm

If all I needed were a single cheap keyboard, I would probably head to Walmart. If shipping is considered in the cost, they are likely cheaper than web vendors.