Just read a story on Flock on Internetnews.com. The author claims out that our live search results are similar to what the Google Toolbar does. Our search box is one of my favorite features, so I wanted to clarify the difference between what you can get from, say, Google Toolbar, and what the Flock search box offers. §

This is an old article. But it has some info on the origins of the three BSDs. Interesting read. §

Nice info here at this Wikipedia page. §

NF: NFE, the Nvidia nForce MCP Ethernet adapter. How did you manage to write this driver? Is it reverse-engineered?

TdR: Nvidia did not giveanyone documentation. Instead, they expect people to load a giganticblob of binary code into their kernel, and just be happy with that. Some Linux people in Germany reverse-engineered the driver years ago,but the rough story I heard is that Nvidia asked them to stop, and they did. This just astounds me! In any case, Jonathan Gray (who startedthis effort) asked for their help with a few problematic technical details, and they refused. I could not believe that, so I asked as well — and they refused again. These are Linux developers, basically placing the community in a situation where they have to run a binaryblob of unknown code from a vendor, instead of sticking to their guns about open source? I must admit, I just don't understand some people.They must have much more flexibility to their belief systems than I have.

Damien Bergamini joined Jonathan toward the end andgot all the bugs out of the driver. We are happy to say that it appearsto be working better than the Nvidia binary blob. It is alsosignificantly smaller, and it is very clean source code.

NF: In the past there was amovement in the OpenBSD community to press hardware vendors to releasedocumentation about their products (Ethernet and wireless network adapters, RAID controllers, etc.) so that drivers could be written for OpenBSD or other open source projects. Some vendors did releasedocumentation, but others didn't. Why do you think vendors do that? They don't want their products to be supported on OpenBSD?

TdR: There are always at least afew efforts in the project to get more documentation out of vendors.But some vendors are still incredibly resistant. We often run into vendors who have signed NDA agreements with Linux developers, who willthen happily write a Linux driver filled with magic numbers, which only one developer in the world understands. Having signed the NDA ensuredthat Linux got a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It cannot be fixed by anyone else, because it is full of secrets. It is a source code version of a blob.

There are many reasons why vendors will not giveinformation out. I believe that all their reasons are a lie to thecustomer. I can get nearly complete data books for the parts that arein my car, and I should be able to get them for the parts in mycomputer. §

I use OpenBSD and NetBSD on my laptop now. Left all the linuces — waste of time. And reading interviews like these, I feel all the more glad. One of the reasons I took to Linux long ago in college (apart from my fondness for CLI and Unixy concepts) was this whole thing about "freedom" — but Linux seems to be slowly losing out on that. Giving into proprietary drivers and NDAs and stuff like that …

I am searching for a particular interview of Theo. Just can't seem to get my hands on that …

Shaji Kailas is planning a new movie with Dileep as the hero. The idea
is to convert Dileep from a soft neighborhood boy to a macho macho man.
While the discussions were going on, we happened to be the fly on the
wall. §

This one’s too good!! :)

Shagedellic!! §

It’s a DVD ISO image btw. No point downloading unless you have a DVD writer. ( I don’t. :-( )

Check this out §

Goodness! That’s such an elephant size security hole in Windows!

Right-click on the Desktop
Create a new Shortcut
Point the location of the item to any executable… such as: c:\windows\system32\calc.exe
Name the shortcut, for example, www.microsoft.com
Start Internet Explorer (IE5 and IE6 work best)
Type “www.microsoft.com” into the address bar
Enjoy.

Nice post here by Joey. §

I gave up on using Ubuntu sometime ago. Infact I gave up on using Linux itself sometime ago. But I do agree with whatever the author has to say. 

Meanwhile, Google has released Picasa for Linux. More specifically, for a "certain" bunch of Linux distributions. §

… if the most popular Linux distro has the smallest engineering team and is the least stable, it threatens the perception of the desktop distro market as a whole. Meanwhile, if Debian had 2 million new customers and 10,000 new bugs, I’ll bet they could pick up the pace for the increased workload, especially if it came with a few New Maintainer applications. §

A very interesting and critical look at Ubuntu. Heck, after reading the above line I seriously started wondering if sticking with Ubuntu was a good choice after all. For one, are they really doing much good for Debian (a distro I like loads) with all their work? And two, how much can I trust it for stability and stuff?

A good read.

My boss's home machine kept throwing messages that the machine was infected by spyware/ malware and that one needed to click the prompt to remove them. The machines looked very much like Windows's Security Centre warnings, but something about them wasn't quite normal. Clicking on them didn't produce any effect; and neither did there seem to be any spyware or similar programs in the startup menu etc (I used HijackThis and StartupList). Finally I booted into Safe Mode, and then clicking the link gave me a Page Not Found error (coz I wasn't connected to the net). Turns out the page in question was SpyFalcon.com, and from there it was easy to search the net and find a way of removing it. §