Rants and Raves

Remember Apple suing Microsoft for “stealing” the Mac’s user interface?  A user interface that Apple actually stole from Xerox?

On 4 March 2010 Apple filed suite against HTC for infringing on some twenty patents for iPhone technology they allegedly used in their Android handsets (but not their Windows Mobile handsets).

It’s pretty obvious to me that HTC manufactured Windows Mobile handsets long before the iPhone, and those handsets used many of the basics of the technology described in the twenty iPhone patents — so who’s stealing from whom?

It’s totally ironic that Steve Jobs is quoted as saying:

We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.

When in 1996 in the PBS Documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” he said:

Picasso had a saying. He said that ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

I think Eric Von Hipple of MIT’s Sloan School of Management may have hit the nail on the head:

The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.

Those who can’t innovate, litigate.

Steve Jobs, 1996 “Triumph of the Nerds”

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Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory.

· Pericles, funeral oration

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SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) are two methods to help indentify email which is likely not SPAM.  SPF was originally proposed in 2003 by Meng Weng Wong and Wayne Schlitt (SPFv1 RFC4408) as an open standard (SPF is backed by the Sender Policy Framework Council); DKIM originally merged and enhanced DomainKeys from Yahoo and Identified Internet Mail from Cisco (RFC4870 superseded by RFC4871) forming an open standard (DKIM is backed by an industry consortium).

Both SPF and DKIM attempt to provide information to receiving SMTP servers about whether or not a particular email message is authentic.

SPFv1 uses a very simple approach where a domain’s DNS server provides a root level TXT record that supplies information about SMTP mail servers that are permitted to originate domain email.

DKIM uses a more complex digital signature on each message (information about which is stored in a sub-domain in domains DNS containing self-signed keys).

You can read up on the specifics of each through the reference links provided below.

Microsoft SPF Record Wizard · OpenSPF Wizard

DKIM (Wikipedia)

Tags: Communications, Email, Technology // Add Comment »

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

· Walter Pater, referring to the Mona Lisa

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POP:
host: mail.<yourdomain>
host: <yourhost>.justhost.com
port: 110
port: 995, SSL

IMAP:
host: mail.<yourdomain>
host:<yourhost> .justhost.com
port: 143
port: 993, SSL

SMTP:
host: mail.<yourdomain> (requires authentication)
host: <yourhost>.justhost.com
port: 25
port: 2626
port: 465, SSL

WEB MAIL:
url: https://<yourdomain>:2096
url: https://<yourhost>.justhost.com:2096

• SSL: you will need to accept the self signed certificate; some mail readers do not allow you to retain self signed certificates, so you will need to do that each and every time a connection (or initial connection) is made.
• SMTP: requires authentication; also you ISP may block port 25 (which is why port 2626 is also supported).
• <yourhost> would be something like cl111 so for example cl111.justhost.com
• <yourdomain> would be something like mydomain.com so for example mail.mydomain.com

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The persistent effort of so-called modern minds to explain mysteries can yield nothing in the long run but the nostalgic satisfaction of the small boy who discovers at last that his mechanical duck was made up of two wheels, three springs and a screw — objects which are doubtless reassuring, but he has lost his mechanical duck, and he has usually not found an explanation as to how it works.

· Carole Owens, The Lost Days of Agatha Christie

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Today US President Barrack Obama is supposed to deliver a revised plan to overhaul US Health care… but yesterday Warren Buffet hit the nail on the head while speaking on CNC he said the country’s out-of-control health care costs — at US $2.3 trillion a year and growing — are like “a tapeworm eating at our economic body.”

Mr Buffet underscored that he would support overhaul legislation proposed by the US Senate, but that he would prefer existing proposals be scrapped in favor of a new plan targeted at addressing costs.

“What we have now is untenable over time,” said Mr. Buffett, noting the U.S. health-care system eats up about 17% of the country’s economic output, compared with about 10% for Canada and many other countries. “I believe in insuring more people. But I don’t believe in insuring more people until you attack the cost aspect of this. And there is no reason for us to be spending 17% or thereabouts when many other developed countries are spending, we’ll say, 9 or 10%. They have more beds, they have more nurses, they have more doctors, they even have more consultations by far.”

The major obstacles to any real reform would be the power health care lobbyists (representing pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, doctors, and other health care related entities) as well as the American public.

Without reform, the cost of U.S. health care — already the most expensive in the world — is forecast to jump to around 25% of the US economic output by 2025.

My feeling is that since the Democrats couldn’t come up with a plan that they could all get behind when they had control of the House, Senate, and Presidency it’s extremely unlikely that they can build bi-partisan support for much of any real reform now.

American politics is always a shining example that change isn’t always progress.

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In the world eye we were Laurel and Hardy

In our minds we were Heathcliff and Cathy

In a moment of wisdom we were a wizard and a witch

In a moment of freedom we were Don Quixote and Sancho

In reality we were just a boy and a girl who never looked back

…

· Yoko Ono, You’re the One

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I wrote this little batch file to make Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have a user directory structure more similar to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7.

You simply need to run it as a user with administrative privileges and it will create the “User” directory in the root of your drive along with all the other more “sane” directory structures that the newer Windows use — don’t worry, it uses links so that you won’t have two copies of the information, and applications that expect the old structure will continue to work.

There is an older BLOG post that describes how it works:  Revise Windows XP “Home” Directory Structure if you’re interested in the details.

MkLinks

Tags: Computers, Technology, Windows, ► Downloads // Add Comment »

…throughout The Nature of Gothic Ruskin asserts the idea of beauty in imperfection. The preference for change and variety in the Gothic style over symmetry and perfection, in Ruskin’s mind, expresses the flawed, but infinitely inspired, imagination of the Gothic workman.

· Peter O”Neil

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