Wireless cities getting problematic.

City-wide wireless seems like a great idea. It’s the implementation that’s getting difficult.

And for some maybe not so comic relief from the lunatic fringe

Solutions to cell phone dead spots coming

One solution plugs a mini cell site into the home broadband, the other lets users roam from cell to wi-fi networks. Link

Dell releases Ubuntu computers

A Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux with Core 2 Duo and 1GB RAM is just $900.

Osalt.com

Open source alternatives to well-known commercial software

There’s lots of useful software here, all neatly categorized.

Microsoft is not the real threat

says Ubuntu founder

Comment spam

Scoble says his comment spam is out of control. On this little blog I sometimes get 1,000 comment spams a day. Madness.

WordPress.com needs to support captcha. I just installed captcha on my much larger main blog, Politics in the Zeros, and I expect that will end virtually all the spam comments. The WordPress.org Codex lists several captcha programs.

Then, the comments that remain that Askimet thinks are spam will be a much smaller, more manageable amount, and it’ll be much easier to weed out the false positives.

Save us from the antivirus programs

A recent update of Norton antivirus sometimes deletes important system files, thus leading to the Blue Screen of Death when rebooted. Well, you certainly won’t be getting many viruses after that happens, now will you?

Can you imagine if recalls of automobiles resulted in the car being inoperable? The automaker would be buried in lawsuits.

(This post blogged using Ubuntu Linux, where such disasters do not occur because there’s no need  for antivirus software!)

Google to start paying for news feeds?

Could be…

It now seems that Google has accepted it has lost the argument over carrying stories without paying for them.

Kite magic

Multiple Kite Champion at the peak of his art form. Watch the video.

Microsoft “no plans to litigate”

“We have no plans to litigate. You can never say we’ll never do anything in the future, but that’s not our strategy. That article spins it on the attack. The only new piece information in that article is that it just put a number on the patents.”

– Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy and director of Microsoft’s work with open-source projects

Block Google AdSense ads on Google using Google!

If you append the parameter “output=googleabout” to Google Web Search URL, the search results page will not carry any AdSense ads.

Microsoft running scared from Linux

Speak to anyone outside of Microsoft who knows anything about Microsoft’s claim that Linux software violates 42 of its patents and most of them agree - Microsoft is running scared. Many believe that Microsoft’s public announcement smacks of desperation and is a risky move by a company that has run out of ideas.

Soble links to a Microsoft Open Source Software Lab employee who responded in his blog after getting reamed in the blogosphere for attacking open source. Yeah, he apologized, sort of, then implied the whole thing Microsoft-open source thing was overblown when clearly it’s not. But he’s a coder geek, and not Ballmer or one of the hired gun lawyers who are planning to ligitate instead of  innovate.

This will be an instructive example of how a bloated company that’s out of ideas may win a battle or two but will lose the war.

The CEO of Sun, a company who gets it, says to Ballmer

You would be wise to listen to the customers you’re threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn’t be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark.

Indeed.

Microsoft’s 235 supposed patents

A patent lawyer says this is old news and may be much ado about nothing. Interesting.

Leaders innovate, losers litigate

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents.

Microsoft long ago stopped innovating, this just being further proof of that. Expect long nasty court battles.

Do you really want to buy software from a company like this? I sure don’t.

Progamming quotations

A few from the SysProg.net collection

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code. (Paul Graham)

Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free. (Linus Torvalds)