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Getting the year from wtmpx/wtmp has never been easier. That is, if you don't count the past few years that I've been doing it the hard way ;)

It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days. The only problem is, you have to join the Air Force to get it. The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as a template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us.

On that venue, in the summer of 2005, I wrote an article that pissed thousands of people off. To date, that article posted the third-most comments we've ever received. Many of them were not positive. I lost friends over it. I made publicly some fairly controversial statements. I said that the current model of the GNU/Linux desktop system would flounder in obscurity until a permanent level of standardization was reached. And then I crossed the line.

The Netbook OS really shouldn't matter, but evidence suggests that consumers have rejected Netbooks running Linux and some suggest Android Netbooks could suffer a similar fate.

In the Linux and FOSS worlds we've been complaining for decades about vendor lock-in, platform and service silos, walled gardens and other annoyances. So now I'm wondering what scholarship has been devoted to these practices.

How desperate is Microsoft? It appears that from May 5th you will be able to download and install Windows 7 release code and keep it, free of charge and legally, until June 2010 on as many machines as you like.

K9Copy is a KDE application which allows to transcode and backup your DVDs. K9Copy is one of the big players when it comes to DVD transcoding, together with dvd::rip and AcidRip, allowing to encode DVD ISO images and mounted DVDs too.

After installing ffmpeg from svn with checkinstall, I had the problem that the also installed library libavcodec51 is not compatible with the one delivered with Ubuntu. But I could not simply uninstall it so that the manually installed version was used because that caused problems with libxine1-ffmpeg, which stopped kaffeine, amarok and other software from running properly.

I had the opportunity of listening to a presentation by a poorly-informed faculty member at my school regarding copyright laws. This was an eye-opening experience for me into the way those who believe to have a solid grasp of copyright view it. My class of 30+ students listened intently, believing everything they were told, as Mrs. Smith started her lecture…

linux, unix, computer, humor, decade, 1998, 2008, funny

This is a guide I've written for the new Ubuntu release with LXDE. Tweaking for SSD included. It is targeted for the Acer Aspire One A110, but it will work with any other Netbook. Some Conky tips for LXDE included.

In a previous article I discussed several ways to reset/recover/circumvent root password. While the article was written to assist people who have lost or forgotten a root password it was also a statement about security. As I was reading up on the subject I noticed there are some things I didn't know about, as my knowledge of the subject has aged a bit.

This document explains how to set up a fully encrypted para-virtualized XEN instance. In this howto, the host system is running Debian Etch, while the guest system to be installed will be using Debian Lenny. If you are concerned about your privacy, you might want to consider using hard disk encryption to protect your valuable private data from spying eyes. Usually, the easiest way would be to use your distribution's installer to set up a fully encrypted system; I think most recent Linux distributions support this. However, when you are using XEN to provide virtualization, there are situations where you might not want to encrypt your whole computer with all guest instances, but instead only encrypt one OS instance. This howto will deal with exactly this situation. It assumes that the XEN host system is already up and running.

For Linux users who don't need absolute top-notch 3D performance, Intel is considered the preferred graphics solution, not least because the company develops its drivers as open source within the framework of the X.org project. However Intel’s drivers are currently in a state of some disarray.

It has been a while since last talking about OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Phoronix, but this weekend we decided to fire up Sun's latest build based upon the SXCE 111a build available from Genunix. Enclosed are a few screenshots and other information about this Sun community operating system that should be officially released within a month.

Google and the members of the Open Handset Alliance have been sued for $94 million for trademark violation. The case is being brought by Erich Specht and Android Data Corp, who were granted a trademark on "Android Data" in 2002. Android Data Corp is a small private company based in Palantine, Illinois. In 2007, Google applied for the Android trademark, just before launching its mobile phone operating systems. In February 2008, the PTO rejected that application citing the Android Data trademark. Google appealed, saying Android Data had lost it's claim due to inactivity, but the PTO rejected that and other appeals and suspended Google's application in November 2008.

Here's a review of top 10 applications for KDE4.

One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used. It's impressive what can happen when attention is drawn to a problem; the 2.6.30 kernel will contain fixes which seemingly eliminate many of the latencies experienced by ext3 users. This article will look at the changes that were made, including a surprising change to the default journaling mode made just before the 2.6.30-rc1 release.

The next Portland State Aerospace Society rocket, scheduled for first launch this summer, will have new hardware, including a switch from CAN to USB.

The VAR Guy is hanging out today at SMB Nation, a conference for small business VARs — most of whom work with Microsoft. Still, open source companies like Untangle and xTuple have quietly found a home at the conference.