Swimming in the Pensieve

…”So, she’s good looking and spends alot of money on fancy designer clothing. How should I put this?…
…Women care about that sort of thing way more than men do. Looking sexy will get you into a man’s bed, or maybe the pages of one of his magazines, but it won’t get you into his heart. Any women who thinks otherwise is a fool who is going to get her heart broken time and again by guys who were just interested in having sex with her.” — Brett Kinsella

…”When we looked through the Diebold source code, we found it to be poorly written and incomplete… If their systems are truly among the most rigorously tested and trustworthy, then we are all in a lot of trouble.” — Jay Lyman
{Personally, it sounds like they were reviewing microsoft code.}

…”You may be able to run XP on an older system if all you mean by ‘run’ is boot, but you won’t be able to get any work done. For example, I dragged out one of my aforementioned 350 MHz Compaqs and I did get XP to run on it. Of course, I couldn’t run Office XP on it. Well, maybe I could, but after five minutes of waiting for Word to show up, I gave up on it.
But, on that same system, MEPISLite 3.3.2 not only ran fine, but I was also able to use KOffice 1.4.2 quite successfully on it.” — Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

…”Bill Hilf, who is director of Microsoft’s Platform Technology Strategy and heads its Linux and open-source lab claims that patching, particularly for security, is not a Microsoft problem…
…Yes, there’s no question about it. When it comes to comparing Windows and Linux patching, there’s a clear winner, and it’s not Microsoft.” — Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
…”Brian Krebs found that Microsoft fixes its security holes faster, much faster, when the whole world knows about them than when the company is told privately.
Krebs analyzed Microsoft’s patch data for the last three years. He found that, when very few people knew about a bug, ‘In 2003, Microsoft took an average of three months to issue patches for (critical) problems reported to them. In 2004, that time frame shot up to 134.5 days, a number that remained virtually unchanged in 2005.’
But, if the problem was fully disclosed, if was an open problem, ‘In 2003, it took an average of 71 days to release a fix for one of these flaws. In 2004 that time frame decreased to 55 days, and in 2005 shrank further to 46 days.’” — Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
{F/LOSS patches are normally out in less than a week.}

INRE: Brett Kinsella
My wife isn’t a big fan of Brett’s. She sees too much Un-PC verbage that I know is the result of what I can call tender years. Frankly, I regard ‘PC’ writing and speech to be the external evidence of spinelessness–despite the contemporary cultural indoctrination which produces such ‘PC-ness’. I prefer to read or listen to somebody who speaks his or her mind–after giving an issue some intelligent thoughtwhether or not I happen to agree with their conclusions.

Unlike politicians and management-types, at least you know where they stand (and that they are capable of doing so unassisted).

I know where Brett stands on the subject of men as ‘birds on a wire’ for the rabid, Molly Yard types who are simply looking for another punching bag. It seems that, as he observes, certain women willingly feed the hardliner-N.O.W. myth of men as animals.

INRE: Jay Lyman

The Diebold debacle has been hacked-to-death in the media, from the perspective of those who perceive questioners of the integrity of the past few elections as being on the fringe of society. I’m certain that the technical merits of alternative vote counting systems come to the fore, as information comes to light that casts further doubt upon the ideal of ‘counting every vote accurately’ as anything more than lip service in Washington D.C.

INRE: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Astute. Far more balanced than David Coursey. Excellent points cast before the readers. Definitely worth your reading time.

Kudos to Steve: You have pleasantly surprised me over the years. That’s tough to do. Thank You.