Artikel - 30.6.2004 - 10.7.2004

Haselbacher: Broken handlebar cause of crash

Sure, the sprinters at the Tour, that's not a knitting circle. But McEwen's behavior is still inexcusable. Especially as a sprinter, he should have much better control over himself – after all, sprinters are more prone to crashes than any other professional cyclists due to the chaos in the sprint. Insulting an injured person on the ground and still not finding anything wrong with it the next day shows little sporting spirit.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Sensor Brush

A truly high-tech solution for cleaning chip surfaces of digital SLR cameras: statically charged brushes. One brush stroke, then recharge the brush with compressed air to build up static electricity for 5-10 seconds. That sounds like very time-consuming work for cleaning the chip. Somehow I would find it better if manufacturers finally tackled the problem directly in the camera, the way Canon does with apparently less electrostatically charged CMOS sensors or Olympus with their ultrasonic cleaning system.

Here's the original article.

Fast Ego-Blogging

No, that's not me. It's someone else with my name (or am I the other one with his name? Is this all confusing here). He has some really nice photos online, so I thought I'd pass some of my Google PageRank along to him (after all, I have 6/10 on the homepage)

Here's the original article.

Hamilton suffered severe contusions

And Menno, don't break Tyler for me, he's needed as competition for Armstrong!

And please leave Phonak intact too, they're bringing a new color to the sport. And they can ride well too!

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Haselbacher: No Pelvis or Leg Fracture

Ouch. That's really brutal. It's pretty strange when it's considered lucky if only 3 ribs and the nose are broken... Hopefully he'll get through this without major problems. He really got hit hard - the images from the crash looked severe, like the entire field behind him ran/fell over him...

On Radsport-News.com I found the original article.

India and Bangladesh dispute over elephants in border area

And here people usually get upset if just a branch of a fruit tree grows over the property line. I wonder what they would do if 100 elephants immigrated from the neighboring property?

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Lawsuit against Adobe for Patent Infringement by Acrobat

Oh man, ridiculous patents again. If you actually read the patent:

  • load a file from a URL
  • search this file for links
  • also download links with the URL as root

Well, I recommend studying the CVS Trees of wget - I've linked the history of the Makefile.in here. That goes back to 1999 in the CVS. wget has a parameter -m that implements exactly the algorithm described. Mirroring itself - and that's what this great and oh-so-innovative patent is about - is as old as FTP and the mirror script. Only here it's about web mirroring. Of course, that's incredibly innovative and naturally has to be protected by patent.

Yet another example of why we don't want software patents and why the industry minister is lying when he calls software patents innovation-promoting.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Man Accused of AltaVista Theft Working on MSN Search?

Cute. He just wanted to see how the source has changed since his departure. Sure. And Microsoft wanted to see that perhaps too?

At ResearchBuzz there's the original article.

Petacchi and Cipollini both leave Tour

Two sprinters out. Ok, Petacchi was clear - his crash and the shoulder injury are bad preconditions. But whether Domina Vacanze gets another Tour nomination, I consider doubtful. In any case, not because of Cipollini ...

At VeloNews: The Journal of Competitive Cycling there's the original article.

Professors in Court for Online Fraud

And once again a sign of where extensive empowerment of any law enforcement agencies can lead. Something like this certainly threatens us too if all the plans from surveillance-Schily are actually implemented - because eventually the authorities will always have to search for ever more absurd reasons why, despite far-reaching possibilities, they still have no clue what's going on around them...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

SCO vs. Linux: SCO demands unimpeded access to evidence

Man, the SCO lawyers are really going crazy. Give us everything you have in documents. We're looking for something, we don't know what and not where, but we want all your data. Sure, IBM will certainly review this request very favorably. I'm curious to see IBM's response in court.

Devil's grin

But it's really audacious how persistently SCO insists on this extremely broadly worded disclosure, even though the judge herself has already clearly rejected it and called it excessive.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Ruling: Possession of Small Cannabis Amounts Remains Criminal

After the hearing, it was rumored that they met in a nearby courthouse bar to celebrate the conclusion of the proceedings with a couple of beers and schnapps ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Agreement on Spam under the Auspices of the ITU?

And now the covetousness begins: The ITU, being the only standards organization that practically brings together all international governments and private entities at one table, would be very well suited for this. Sorry, Mr. Hill, that's wrong. Private at the ITU is equivalent to large corporations. But quite amusing: At the protocol level, a solution would basically be needed that lies between the X.400 standard, which failed in the IP world, and SMTP, Hill said. Ouch. No. Nobody wants anything that even remotely lies on or in the direction of X400. That's one of the stillbirths of the ITU's design-by-committee philosophy. A pile of garbage. Mountains of paper. Far too complicated.

At heise online news there's the original article.

BDI demands one week less vacation

A slightly higher taxation of corporations would also be acceptable, but of course he has something against that. What is acceptable is always only what others have to do.

What is not acceptable, however, is the constant grumbling of various industry representatives against the allegedly so uncompetitive Germans. Funny only that we are export champions - how do we manage that if our products are all so lacking in competitiveness?

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Epson RD-1 Examples

The text is in Japanese, but fortunately the images speak internationally

One could almost weaken if it weren't for the gigantic acquisition resistance of an estimated 3500 euros ...

Here you can find the original article.

When sprinters stalk each other ...

... a Tour stage finally gets really exciting towards the end. O'Grady clearly just played his great experience (and his strength of course - Backstedt isn't exactly a young guy either).

Though I had the feeling that the three more active riders in the group of five let the other two (Backstedt and Casar had fallen back slightly) catch up on the final climb. Which would be okay after a breakaway group over almost the entire stage. Riding 190 kilometers alone at the front in that lousy weather is quite a performance.

The main field, meanwhile, was busy staging the most impressive mass crashes. Shortly before the breakaway arrived at the finish, they managed it and knocked over some 20-30 riders and sent another bunch into the dirt.

And otherwise? Voeckler gets the yellow jersey. Aldag the prize for the most impressive looping (hopefully everything is still intact!). And Haselbacher the golden lemon for the wildest action in a sprint.

Yes, I'm working from home today and happen to have the TV running in the background. So what?

Zafira to Poland because of arms deal?

The whole haggling is already quite dubious.

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

PyLinda

The Linda implementation in Python is progressing well and can now work with multiple servers (good for failover situations) and has some of the newer features that were discussed for Linda. Very interesting for distributed applications that need shared data. Eventually I'll need to marry this with the Toolserver Framework for Python. If you don't understand any of this right now: no worries, it's only interesting for programmers. Here's the original article.

Rescue for Hamburg Film Funding

The elimination of Hamburg's film funding would also be a catastrophe. And a rather stupid one at that - following the recent successes of young German cinema.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Tour de France: Iban Mayo experiences his Waterloo

Ouch. Very frustrating for Euskatel - hopefully they'll keep their fighting spirit and still put on a good show. After all, both (Mayo and Zubeldia) were really strong riders last year.

Being able to follow a Tour only via ticker and just watching the weekend stages is quite frustrating, by the way

confused face

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

UN: Spam problem solvable in two years

Oh man, those at Netzeitung don't have much of a clue, do they? Calling the ITU the UN is more than silly. The ITU is indeed a UN organization - but it is primarily carried by companies, especially large telecommunications enterprises. Above all, the ITU is one thing: the arch-enemy of the IETF.

Because the ITU thinks it's responsible for all communication systems and believes it should have a say in the Internet as well. But the IETF is the standards body there (or rather, not a standards body, but just an RFC manager). Standards in the IETF are created in a completely different way than in the ITU.

The ITU defines standards in committees. Access is regulated and burdened with hefty fees. Private individuals have no chance of getting into the ITU - that only works through national institutions or large companies. What becomes a standard is drafted in closed working groups - and based on what the participants want. As a rule, an ITU standard ends up as a collection of all requirements. The standard itself is often only available for a fee, reference implementations before standardization work is rarely available, and implementations in general are usually proprietary and cost money.

The IETF, on the other hand, only manages the organizational part - the actual RFCs are created in open working groups. Anyone who wants to can participate. RFCs must - if they want to be on the standards track - demonstrate two independent but interoperable implementations that must be accessible to everyone. Existing and free code defines what becomes a standard.

ITU statements on the Internet topic are often simply attempts to gain influence in an area where the ITU plays no role, even though communication technology is increasingly oriented in that direction. You only need to think about Internet telephony to see what kind of problem this could cause for the ITU - which currently controls almost the entire telephony sector.

But precisely because of the very different working methods, almost nobody actually wants the ITU as a relevant organization in the Internet sector. An Internet in which standards are defined by national representatives and large companies would not be where the Internet is today thanks to the sleeves-rolled-up and pragmatic approach of the IETF.

So please don't sneak the ITU into titles as the UN. It's not the UN that wants something, but the ITU - and what it wants is only indirectly related to our problems. What it wants is influence and control.

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you'll find the original article.

Federal Chancellor: Patents Strengthen Innovation Drive and Investment Readiness

Even more venting about the concentrated incompetence (also commonly known as Federal Justice Minister) and the industry chancellor.

angry face

No, patents do not strengthen the willingness to innovate or the readiness to invest. They solely strengthen the position of large corporations with plenty of money in their war chest against smaller companies with less money in theirs. Enforcing patents has nothing to do with who is ultimately the inventor - but solely with who can afford a larger legal department and can sustain the longer legal battle.

After kicking patients in the teeth with the proposal to relieve the pharmaceutical industry, now comes the kick in the teeth to the mid-market software industry. Because it is precisely from this sector that innovations often come, yet as a rule they cannot afford all this patent wrangling without a big player backing them up.

And in the process, this dismantles Free Software, which eventually won't be allowed to implement anything anymore because every bit of nonsense gets blocked by stupid trivial patents.

At heise online news there is the original article.

Dialer scam using the name c't stopped

This dialer pack is getting ever more audacious ...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Former Cultural Capital Candidate Without Cultural Alderman?

The city council does not want to renew the contract with the current cultural affairs director - who belongs to the Greens. But they also don't have their own candidate because the one they had lined up simply turned them down. Now the office is supposed to remain vacant for months until they find a suitable candidate for the job. Isn't that amusing? With such an organizational disaster, they seriously wanted to apply to be cultural capital ...

iPods a security risk, warns complete idiot

Exciting. Gartner is warning about iPods because they can bypass firewalls and virus scans on mail servers - users can transport data on them. Sure, the same applies to all other mobile hard drives, USB memory sticks, floppy disks and whatever else, but of course they have to explicitly warn about the iPod.

Do the Gartner guys just want to rip off a few iPods from scared enterprises, or are they really that stupid?

The original article is at Engadget - here.

The internet is shit

Once a year you're allowed to point this out. Read!

Here's the original article.

Because yesterday was about online oldies...

I searched groups.google.com for when the first newspostings appeared in which the provider association I started with (as a user and founding member) was referenced. We founded ourselves (OUT e.V. - Domain westfalen.de) in 1993. You can read about this in the association history. However, we initially only had UUCP because we couldn't get an IP connection - the University of Münster refused to connect us, contrary to the DFN's directional guidelines. From 1995 onwards we had a connection through a local provider. And on May 1, 1995, the first posting was archived in which one of our users provided his homepage. Unfortunately http://archive.org/ doesn't go back far enough, the first homepages would be quite interesting... Here's the original article.

Resistance to 50-hour week

What kind of economic experts are these supposed to be? Probably some university armchair theorists who have never had to do serious work and therefore have no idea what work actually means. How workers toil themselves to exhaustion, and that's already at the 40-hour workload that's unfortunately become normal again. But that doesn't interest any of the experts, on none of the involved sides. They couldn't care less - as long as they can spout their intellectual nonsense.

I experienced firsthand with my father how his health suffered more and more from work and was relieved that he was able to take early retirement. But for these armchair theorists, work apparently consists of spouting stupid comments in some tabloid interview...

At tagesschau.de - The News of the ARD you can find the original article.

Old Sacks Online

Too bad. I don't have such clear-cut proof. Only that I appear in a statistics from early August 1992 with my ancient address under the mouse COE in Usenet. I must have been online for at least 12 years by that month, assuming the statistics included at least July. My first archived posting is a bit later and then already from the Maus ST2 (of which I was one of two operators) from October 1992. I feel old...

At Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp I found the original article.

Ego-Blogging

I just wanted to point out that I'm the top 5 Georg Bauer results on Google

(However - as I noticed from a comment by Kai - only on google.com, not on google.de)

Here's the original article.

Schröder suggests relief for pharmaceutical industry

Great. The pharmaceutical industry typically shows itself in public either by bringing overpriced drugs to market to finance bogus expenses while ripping off the sick, or by throwing drugs like Lipobay onto the market that in the form they come to market then kill people, or by vehemently refusing to take urgently needed action against AIDS or other epidemic diseases for example in Africa, or by diligently trying to manipulate medical associations, doctors, hospitals and whatever else.

But now the Chancellor wants it to be relieved of burden. The patients - who are first and foremost the victims of the pharmaceutical industry and its rip-offs - are being diligently burdened more.

And with such conduct, the SPD wonders why citizens no longer believe that they stand for social issues? What kind of complete idiot does a politician have to be to spout such nonsensical remarks and then still be amazed when he loses elections by a landslide?

A relief for the pharmaceutical industry would be a slap in the face to all patients. Schröder, that's appalling!

angry face

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there's the original article.

Steffen Wesemann hit by car

Oh man. Training accidents seem to be piling up lately. And it's constantly car drivers and trucks that are running over cyclists.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.

Report: Software Project for Tax Authorities Failed

Shoddy work. Since 1991 and nothing finished yet? What nonsense. If we did something like that, we would have been out of business for years ...

At heise online news there is the original article.

HP 200 LX

If anyone is wondering about the many links on the right side about the HP 200LX Palmtop - I picked one up on eBay and want to tinker with the device a bit. The main reason is nostalgia - the little box was simply great, and a DOS-based palmtop has the advantage that I can fall back on various beloved software packages from back then (for example, the fantastic PC Scheme from TI and Lotus Agenda, which was pretty cool for its time as a personal data agent).

Morons in the News: Conservative response to Fahrenheit 9/11: A conservative film festival

If anyone ever needs a little reassurance that the world is far more insane than anything our federal comedians can come up with: in the USA, Republicans want to hold their own version of the Cannes Film Festival in protest against Michael Moore's new film, and they're planning to do it in Dallas (for me, ever since the TV series of the same name, the epitome of shallow film torture). Because apparently Cannes is to blame for Michael Moore's film making it to cinemas.

You can find the original article at morons.org headlines at the original article.

Zypries plans levy on PCs and printers

And the personified incompetence of the German federal government continues working to implement everything as absurdly as imaginable. Eventually, copyright fees will be levied on pencils and paper because they are basically suitable for copying too.

One thing will never see a copyright fee, though: politicians' brains. They're far too small and limited to copy anything ...

At NETZEITUNG.DE Internet you can find the original article.

BSI provides government desktop for download

Nice. Especially that they're based on Debian.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Trade unionists and SPD critics found left-wing alliance

The SPD and their fear of the Left. But the rightists within the SPD scare me much more ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

SPD politicians turn their backs on ver.di

Dear Ms. Kastner, even if this might hurt now: you are foolish. Just admit it.

Particularly foolish, however, are SPD politicians who are now starting to play unions off against each other.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Less vacation for more jobs?

And the dismantling continues. Because of course workers are to blame for everything. And because it makes so much sense to have too many unemployed people and then make those who have jobs work even more.

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Inaugural Address

Next he starts lisping and shouting Tschaka ... At das Netzbuch you can find the original article.

Dashboard III

Some more background on what Dashboard is technically and how it works. Cool construction: Bundles (basically marked directories) with a web page, CSS, JavaScript and optionally native code that gets loaded into this whole mess. And all the graphical effects are simply CSS3 possibilities, so everything is built on standards. Sounds quite interesting.

At Surfin' Safari there's the original article.

Symbolic decision against software patents in The Hague

The Dutch once again. Showing us what reason and parliamentary democracy can be. But nothing like that will come our way, surely. After all, our members of parliament would have to show something like an independent opinion and even criticize the government ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

Leica Announces Summilux-M f/1.4/50mm ASPH. Lens

You can still teach old dogs new tricks.

At PhotographyBLOG you'll find the original article.

"Lord of the Rings" now has artificial satellites

I'm already looking forward to the pictures that will come from the probe (now it's actually a satellite).

At Telepolis News (01.07.2004) you can find the original article.

Security hole in iptables in Linux kernel 2.6

Disgusting. Ok, not relevant for all configurations, but still disgusting. And once again proof that C is a stupid language - at best a glorified assembler.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Is Siemens Squandering Its Good Reputation?

Sometimes there are really new things in the news that I wasn't aware of. For example, the fact that apparently Siemens has a good reputation that it could squander...

At WDR.de you can find the original article.

Dashboard

The Safari programmer's blog tells quite briefly what Dashboard widgets are made of: HTML pages with CSS and JavaScript for the dynamic portion. That's clearly quite different from Konfabulator widgets, which are written in JavaScript only and have far less to do with web pages. Sure, Dashboard copied the idea from Konfabulator - but from what one can read, Dashboard goes well beyond Konfabulator in many ways (for example, the configuration pages on the back of the widget - cool idea). Whether this really is a copy of Konfabulator, or whether it was simply logical that this feature would eventually come along, is certainly debatable. To those claiming that Konfabulator was copied, I just want to remind them of one thing: NextStep already had irregular windows and similar graphical gimmicks in its time, albeit much more moderately and of course not in this technical implementation. Still, the idea really isn't as new as some would have you believe now. Strictly speaking, the sticky notes are already an application that moves in the Dashboard direction in terms of design - just not built generally, but specialized.

My personal assessment is that the Konfabulator people simply anticipated something with their tool that had to come sooner or later - they simply filled a gap until that point in time. But expecting that Apple wouldn't come out with such tools would be just as naive as expecting that Apple would stop delivering a web browser for its own system.

On the other hand, I could of course be completely wrong...

At Surfin' Safari you can find the original article.

Ministry of Justice wants to place further obstacles in the way of online copiers

No, Mr. Hucko, with such an absurd proposal, poor pigs is the wrong term. Stupid pigs is more fitting if you're suggesting extending the information rights of law enforcement agencies towards Internet providers to private snooping operations of the film industry. Such nonsense. At heise online news you can find the original article.

Tour withdrawal for Jaksche after training accident

And darn. I like Jaksche - a likeable driver, always seems pretty relaxed in interviews and not as intense or even arrogant as some others. And he's a damn good driver - he certainly would have brought a bit more excitement to the Tour.

I found the original article at Radsport-News.com.