Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

Registrar Network Solutions unsettles Strato customers

Cool methods that Network Solutions is showing off again. They really never learn ...

At heise online news there's the original article.

RWE asks private customers to pay up

The goal of RWE boss Harry Roels, who has been in office since February 2003, is to build closer contact with customers. - but if angry customers visit him with clubs, is the contact close enough then?

I found the original article at tagesschau im Internet.

Does coffee protect against diabetes?

Couldn't it have been something other than coffee, of all things? Ok, Jutta will be happy about it, and the Schockwellenreiter probably too, but I just don't like that brown stuff.

At RP-Online: Science I found the original article.

Commerzbank terminates occupational pensions

Isn't that just great? The bank executives mess up and the employees are supposed to pay for it with their retirement benefits. That's how business bosses imagine life: take no responsibility, because you have employees you can squeeze when customers no longer cover the costs. :-(

Update: As I just heard in the news, of course the board of directors is exempt from this.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Data from the Socket - Garbage in the Radio

And here we learn how once again something useful (shortwave radio) is being sold off for something useless (Internet over power lines), simply because economic interests have changed.

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

The Unbearable Lightness of Stone, Part 2

Here we learn how physics solves the fundamental questions of life and engages in active problem-solving.

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

News: GPL Violation by KISS-Technology

Once again a company that believes licenses are only for them but not for others. I'd wager if someone were to copy their products and use them to create their own products, they'd scream bloody murder. But licenses for free software can simply be ignored, apparently that's what they think.

Here's the original article.

Seven See Offending SCO Code (LinuxWorld Feedback)

So so. SCO shows the allegedly stolen code to various people under their NDA. And what kind of people? Employees of analyst groups and reporters. Very competent people, especially at assessing code origin in an operating system kernel. So again just hot air from SCO.

Here's the original article.

The Best Page In The Universe.

This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong. - is there a better motto for a blog?

Here's the original article.

Healthy thanks to chocolate

It just keeps getting better. Red wine against cancer and heart attacks, chocolate against depression, against cellular aging and against harmful blood fats. Life can be so beautiful when you live healthily ...

I found the original article at Spiegel Online: Wissenschaft.

House arrest for all children under 14 years old

The CSU has gone crazy again. To tackle juvenile delinquency, they don't want to investigate and address the root causes—no. The CSU won't make it that simple for itself. Instead, all children under 14 years old are to be generally criminalized and should only be allowed outside after 8:00 PM if accompanied by adults. And just to add insult to injury: if children become neglected in the CSU's opinion, their parents' financial assistance should be cut (so they slide into crime even faster?) and if necessary, custody should be taken away from them more quickly (because children in care homes never become criminals, right?). In return, schools are supposed to teach values like politeness, respect, morality, and consideration.

Well, the next step will surely be a Söder Youth, re-education camps, and a snappy greeting with a raised hand?

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

OmniWeb 5 Preview

Yeah, everyone else has already written about it, but I think the features really sound useful, so it's worth linking to. Of course, I'd prefer it if Apple would build some of them (especially the Workspaces!) into Safari.

For Jutta, however, the Site Preferences feature is certainly interesting: website-dependent settings. If that includes JavaScript activation, I think it could really appeal to her.

Here's the original article.

Snakelets - simple Python web app server

Seems like quite an interesting alternative to heavier web servers - perhaps for small control systems with web interfaces, or for management servers or similar.

Here's the original article.

Germans Should Work Longer

Certainly the ideal remedy for unemployment...

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Panorama freedom with gaps?

I hope this reasoning is more correct than the stuff in the FAZ, because if not, it would really be fatal for my photography websites ( Leicaesk and hugo.f-2.org). It's really bad that you have to think about this at all, because you can no longer be sure that common uses like photographing publicly accessible buildings or artworks are still covered by copyright law. At netbib weblog there is the original article.

Transition from Telekom to T-Mobile with Glitches

Why are they surprised - it's not much different than the contract problems ordinary citizens have with Telekom

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you can find the original article.

Eye examination costs nothing extra

So now the consulting service will become a hassle between the statutory health insurance association, health insurance companies, and the health ministry. It's not worth betting on the loser—it will probably just be the patient who ends up running around with their receipt from pillar to post...

And it would be nice if the statutory health insurance association would realize that IGeL already ends with "-service" and therefore an IGeL service is about as useful as an LCD display...

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Railway Tariff Jungle

The nonsense with regional transport associations - in which suddenly Deutsche Bahn tariffs no longer apply, but only regional tariffs, even if they are regional trains operated by Deutsche Bahn itself and not by a private competitor. Which means that BahnCards no longer work on the Münster-Nordwalde route, since the RVM doesn't accept the BahnCard. In Schleswig-Holstein it seems only the BahnCard 50 was affected, but that's already annoying.

Long-distance trains seem to be the only thing Deutsche Bahn is still interested in - and those were quickly upgraded from Interregio to IC and now to ICE, making them more expensive accordingly. For me, BahnCard tariffs still apply since I usually travel between Münster and Hamburg, but it's also gotten more expensive when I take one of the ICEs. Not that they get to the destination significantly faster than the ICs on the same route...

I had actually hoped Deutsche Bahn learned something from the last fiasco, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

At .::: [unsinnfälliges] you can find the original article.

Up to ten percent of the Milky Way habitable

Beam me up, Scotty, there is no intelligent life down here.

At RP-Online: Science I found the original article.

GROKLAW - some background on SCO's ABI claim

Groklaw sheds light on the situation of Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs), which are allegedly supposed to be SCO property, specifically the situation of errno.h and the Linux Personalities for SCO Unix.

Here's the original article.

Homonym Alarm

And more about American paranoia...

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you'll find the original article.

LinuxWorld | Linux's other file sharing software

Nothing particularly special has happened: Red Hat has bought another company, this time Sistina. Sistina is interesting because they have been driving the commercial development of GFS - a cluster filesystem for Linux. OpenGFS has existed for a while, but GFS has more features and above all can work with more base technologies (e.g. via network block devices or iSCSI).

Now another company, Proserve, is writing that their product MatrixServer would be much better, that Sistina would need two more years to bring their product up to their level, and of course that their product would be better suited for critical services. Oddly enough, their product is naturally commercial software.

Where's the logical flaw? Quite simple: OpenGFS already exists and is maintained by more people than just those from Sistina. The features of GFS that were previously reserved for the commercial version will find their way into the free version, provided they are useful. OpenGFS will continue to develop, not necessarily GFS - Proserve has picked the wrong opponent. Proserve will have to think carefully about what to do - mere noise won't be enough on its own. It may well be that their product is better - but the question is whether it still will be in a year, or in two years. Open source develops on the basis of needs, not on the basis of marketing features - and development can happen damn fast.

Of course, there can be a disaster like with Mozilla or OpenOffice, where almost only the original developers from the companies work on the projects, and free development only proceeds very hesitantly (Mozilla is slowly getting better, but who knows OpenOffice hackers?). But given the need for cluster filesystems without a single point of failure, I don't think that's the case here.

Here's the original article.

SPD politician Maas stirs up headscarf dispute

|KK| Once again the annoying reference to the invocation of God in the Basic Law - and of course from the ranks of the Union yet again. People, the word God is used in the preamble, that's correct. But only in one place: "Conscious of their responsibility before God and mankind" - and that's all there is about God in the Basic Law. And that's good. It's already absurd what some politicians think they have to read into this single mention of the word in the Basic Law. But if it helps: I'm in favor of removing the invocation of God from the preamble as well. At least it saves two words, makes the Basic Law shorter and no poor politicians' brains will be confused and thrown into bewilderment anymore.

Teufelsgrinsen

While we're at it, also delete the addition to the oath "so help me God" without replacement. That's obsolete - just like crosses in schools. Or oaths on the Bible. Or state collection of funds for the large Christian churches. Or religious education. And school religious services. It is in any case highly absurd to derive from this single mention that the state must accept Christian symbolism. And of course it is in no way a form of discrimination when Merkelnix talks about not being able to agree to equal treatment of religions in the public service and derives from this that Christian symbols cannot be insignificant to the state and that their removal is no solution.

The separation of church and state apparently never took place. Or Merkelnix wasn't paying attention in school. Or both ...

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

Substance in red wine works against cancer

I have two bottles of red wine left in the cellar. I think I'll devote myself to cancer prevention this weekend.

At RP-Online: Wissenschaft I found the original article.

The Be-All and End-All of Terror Search

I wouldn't be surprised if I think of some CIA maps

At TAZ I found the original article.

Fighting to Save Hubble Telescope From Fiery Death

It's crazy, I still remember when the Hubble Telescope had to be repaired and the initial disappointments after launch when the errors were discovered. And now there's already talk of scrapping it. The currently missing service missions of the Space Shuttles are the reason. I think NASA should only retire Hubble once another telescope is up there and, most importantly, working. It wouldn't be the first time something went wrong at NASA ...

At National Geographic News: Science & Technology I found the original article.

Forbes.com: Linux's Hit Men

Need an adrenaline rush after a wild New Year's Eve bender? Yes? Then read the linked Forbes article. A bunch of wild claims, insults and lies cooked together by one of the mouthpieces of business. A truly disgusting pile of garbage.

Where's the problem? Companies are too stupid to read through the license terms of software they want to use beforehand. They violate the openly available (and by now really thoroughly analyzed) GPL. They get into trouble with the FSF (which, after all, enforces the GPL - that's their job, among other things). Companies realize they screwed up and settle amicably with the FSF. So far so good.

What does Forbes make out of this? A communist conspiracy aimed at destroying commercial software. Wild insinuations that the GPL is just terrible and the companies are naturally just victims. And besides, that's the dark side of open source - how dare these proles actually enforce their licenses?

According to Forbes, everything should take a backseat to commerce and economic exploitation. For Forbes, open source programmers are probably just idiots who are supposed to supply material to talented managers and visionaries. Open source should apparently only consist of performance that can be exploited by companies free of charge and without conditions. Of course Forbes has no problem when the music industry enforces its rights. Or when Microsoft goes after software pirates again. Or when the film industry demands stricter rights to push through even more absurd restrictions on consumer rights.

What I find truly alarming about this is simply that Forbes can still write such garbage and that it's not only read but also believed.

Here's the original article.

XFree86 Core Team Dissolves

I'm curious to see what kind of model this will turn out to be. Although I'd really like to finally have a usable alternative to X11 - X11 is simply a rather gruesome construction in places. A solution like Mac OS X would be good: a new, native GUI with a workable model and a well-integrated X11 server for old applications.

Because let's be honest: the mess of GUI toolkits that arose from the fact that X11 was designed to be toolkit-neutral and doesn't prefer any one of them is one of the big handicaps for Unix on the desktop. And no, KDE or Gnome aren't really a complete answer to that, because they disguise the problems of the base technology but don't really solve them.

That would be something for 2004: finally develop a usable GUI for Unix. Does anyone still need a good New Year's resolution?

At heise online news there's the original article.

An oversized fan book devours the doctors

A book about the doctors. Hopefully it doesn't go to their heads - 3 kilos of paper in the noggin would certainly be detrimental to the texts in the long run

At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Knighthood for Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee

Is Sir Berners-Lee now the Knight of Sad Countenance in the face of commercialization, absurd non-Web techniques, browser incompatibilities, control attempts by large companies, control attempts by politicians, and the absolute garbage that's cluttering the Web? Don Quixote de la Berners-Lee?

At heise online news there's the original article.

Berlusconi's curious definition of a triumph

Well, ok, he suffers from a reality shift. But he shares that problem with our customer chancellor, who also considers the reforms to be the best invention since sliced white bread ...

At RP-Online: Politik I found the the original article.

Linux Magazine - ssh

An older article in Linux Magazine about the use of ssh. Contains a whole series of tips and further links. Among other things, it also points to nosh ( Source and Debian Binary), a shell that very restrictively allows the definition of commands that users can execute. Since the article contains old links, the current ones are provided above. I developed nosh at some point from osh (I can't find a homepage for it) because I needed a shell that really only allowed users to do what was absolutely necessary. In critical environments, this is often much simpler than blocking inappropriate areas through Unix permissions (or alternatively building chroot jails). Here is the original article.

Federal President Rau Speaks Plainly

And why didn't he do it much sooner?

At RP-Online: Politik I found the original article.

Federal Audit Office Criticizes Financing of Tax Reform

This also won't be of interest to anyone. Sustainability in planning hasn't existed for a long time, everything only looks at short-term successes. Maintaining power is simply more important than sensible politics.

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

Clement: Still 18,000 without apprenticeship

Why would a non-training levy do that, it could straightaway get employers to provide more training positions...

Who exactly do Clement and business representatives think they're fooling here? You can clearly see from the development of available training positions that the economy has no interest in providing training at all.

Of course, afterwards there's more complaining that qualified employees are lacking and that they need to bring in Indians or whoever via green cards to have qualified staff. They'll get screwed over just the same and can then meet up with the unemployed youth without training down at the train station...

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Forward, Against Oblivion!

Hey!

Here's the original article.

A Religious Prison

What a great idea! At Telepolis News you can find the original article.

Laughter Works Like Cocaine

Now I also know why User Friendly is addictive. I found the original article at RP-Online: Wissenschaft.

Mars Mission: ESA Trembles for the "Beagle"

Well, there are still some options for making contact, after all the Beagle will be trying out a whole series of variants (frequencies, etc.) over the next 10 days. So there's no need to panic yet.

And Mars Express itself is already a very impressive success - and with the high-resolution camera system and radar system also very interesting.

All in all, a good achievement. Of course, the Beagle would be the icing on the cake - and it wasn't so cheap that you could just throw it away.

At RP-Online: Wissenschaft I found the original article.

Bah, Humbug!

Season's greetings ...

Here you can find the original article.

GSI licenses: A nice present for Fassa Bortolo

Well, US Postal, that's what happens when you focus only on a few highlights and otherwise show up less frequently in cycling. That can cause problems with license issuance...

You can find the original article at RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview.

Open Source Open Genera?

Yes yes yes, please please please!

Here's the original article.

Way Out of the Box

An interesting article by Ted Nelson - the inventor of hypertext - about the limitations that software still imposes on us today, even though we could have come much further. For him, we haven't progressed much beyond paper and pencil, not even with the much-praised Web - ultimately the concept of pages and browsers is still heavily bound to old concepts.

A few of his criticism points are being addressed today by techniques developing in the realm of weblogs (trackback, comment functions at a level below the page, search functions on page elements instead of entire pages, higher degree of linking), but largely he is right - it's actually somewhat depressing when you consider how the digital simulation of paper and pencil is becoming ever more perfect, while at the same time possibilities are being squandered.

Here is the original article.

Anke Engelke becomes the new Harald Schmidt

A mutation that somehow frightens me – from a purely biological standpoint.

tagesschau im Internet has the original article.

GROKLAW - Linus Comments on Alleged SCO Files

SCO not only claims trivial files to be theirs (ctype.h and errno.h are really nothing extraordinary), but they even claim ownership of versions that were demonstrably already used by Linus in Linux 0.01. If SCO has nothing better to show, this will be a laughingstock for the entire industry.

Here's the original article.

LWN: SCO's copyright letter

And here is the letter with the files that would allegedly be illegal in Linux due to copyright claims on APIs. Which is of course particularly amusing when a file is named bsderrors.h - and the comments on the letter point out a few other problems in SCO's claims.

Here's the original article.

Artikel - 22.12.2003 - 6.1.2004