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Why the NSA spying on Americans isn’t helpingPosted by Synfinatic on May 27, 2006 at 7:40 pm in Politics.I don’t usually think of Computerworld as a particularlly great place to read Op-Ed pieces, but this article by Ira Winkler, an ex-NSA analyst explains why not only is the NSA warrentless spying on American’s phone records is illegal (duh) but counter-productive as well if your goal is to stop terrorisim. While I agree with almost everything Ira had to say, I don’t think comparing the NSA actions to Stalin and Hitler is useful. The quickest way to send a discussion to hell is start comparing people to Nazi’s or people like Stalin- not only an emotionally charged issue, but most Americans think what happened in places like Germany and Russia could never happen here. But of course …
Is the US really behind in creating engineers?Posted by Synfinatic on May 24, 2006 at 10:16 pm in Tech.I dunno, but this Washington Post article shows that it’s not a slam dunk that the US is really so far behind India and China creating engineers as common knowledge would have us believe. Turns out there’s a good chance that the US numbers were quite a bit higher then reported and the Chinese numbers (originally based upon reports from the Chinese government) were highly inflated for a number of reasons. When you think about it, China and India have a vested interest in reporting higher then actual numbers (to increase interest in getting companies to open offices in their country) and many companies (both US and foreign) have a strong reason to perpetuate those numbers (to perpetuate the …
Defective By Design?Posted by Synfinatic on May 23, 2006 at 10:44 pm in Cool, Tech.Would you believe that some products that you and I buy today are designed to be defective? That is to say that these products could do things which the designers went out of their way to prevent you from doing with them? Why? Since when in a world when companies must out innovate each other to get a competitive edge did companies actually intentially place arbitrary restrictions to limit what users could do with them? Seems crazy, but that’s exactly what happening with many popular products like iPods, music CD’s and DVD players. Recently, the Free Software Foundation started Defective By Design, a community website dedicated to increasing awareness about how companies are intentionally limiting …
Thanks Ralph!Posted by Synfinatic on May 22, 2006 at 9:20 pm in Cool, tcpreplay.Just want to thank Ralph for sending me a DVD of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit from my Amazon wishlist for my work on tcpreplay. Thanks Ralph!
Adaptec/Supermicro sucksPosted by Synfinatic on at 9:15 pm in /dev/random.I’ve been fighting a drive apparently going bad for a little over two weeks now. One of four drives in a RAID 0+1 array apparently has some blocks going bad and neither the drive nor controller seem to be able to remap the blocks. To make matters worse, the Adaptec controller won’t even tell me which drive has the problem. So after getting absolutely nowhere with Supermicro (whom is providing support due to the nature of their OEM contract) I’m having to replace all four drives in the array. Suck.
Chinese ticket spamPosted by Synfinatic on May 1, 2006 at 11:05 pm in Rant.So lately it seems that a certain Chinese company has started going around and spamming Trac sites by creating tickets promoting who knows what (honestly, I have no idea, it’s all in Chinese). Once was annoying, twice pissed me off, so…
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