Is RAID 5 getting old?

Recently there has been posted a couple of quite interesting papers about storage, disk reliability and more. This article is a good summary and Netapp have responded with a long and interesting reply. As a person that have just invested in a RAID 5 NAS (Network Attached Storage) system, it is a bit worrying to read things like this:

. . . a key application of the exponential assumption is in estimating the time until data loss in a RAID system. This time depends on the probability of a second disk failure during reconstruction, a process which typically lasts on the order of a few hours. The . . . exponential distribution greatly underestimates the probability of a second failure . . . . the probability of seeing two drives in the cluster fail within one hour is four times larger under the real data . . . .

Netapp comments on that with this:

...protecting online data only via RAID 5 today verges on professional malpractice.

Quite disturbing...I guess we can only hope that something better will soon become widely available, not only for the enterprise, but also for the growing marked of consumer NAS products.

What Steve Jobs really said

Cory Doctorow has written this excellent comment about Steve Jobs Open Letter from not too long ago. Basically, Steve Jobs said that Apple would stop using DRM if the music industry would let him. However, as Cory Doctorow nicely displays it in his comment, Apple's actions tells a different story:

Actions speak louder than words. Artists have asked -- begged -- Apple to sell their music without DRM for years. From individual bestselling acts like Barenaked Ladies to entire labels of copy-friendly music like Magnatune, innumerable copyright holders have asked Apple to sell their work as open MP3s instead of DRM-locked AACs. Apple has always maintained that it's DRM or nothing. These artists believe that the answer to selling more music is cooperating with fans, not treating them as presumptive pirates and locking down their music.

Of course, you're entitled to change your mind so Steve, will we see DRM free music on iTunes soon?

Thinkpad Z61t hardware specifications

I just read this nice blog post about finding the hardware specs for your computer on Linux and since I run Kubuntu Edgy on my Thinkpad, I've created a list of the hardware in my Thinkpad too. That means that should be able to simply google for it my laptops hardware specs soon :)

How to crash an in-flight entertainment system

Interesting story about how he crashed an in-flight entertainment system.

Ubuntu On Tap

Nice geeky service: Ubuntu On Tap

Sudo insults

Here is a short tutorial on how to make sudo insult you if you type your password wrong :)

Link: Random blatherings by Battlemaxx

I've linked to this blog for some time, but I haven't mentioned it here for some reason. The Random blatherings by Battlemaxx blog, which I am contributing to sometimes, is a blog that only contains various quotes from an irc chat channel. All the quotes are from the same person, Battlemaxx, and they are generally loads of fun - here's a sample:

We had makeup sex.
Well, she put on makeup.
Then she had sex.
I think.
I couldn't tell.
She had the door closed.
But, I could hear noises.

Arstechnica: Teacher faces jail time for porn pop-ups

This is simply insane:

Who is responsible for keeping the computers at school clean and child-safe? A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of "risking injury to a child." Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.

I'm stunned! Great way to attract new good teachers to the school...

Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken

Some time ago a guy posted the first crack to these new formats and now another improved crack have been made:

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

For DRM to work, it has to be airtight. There can't be a single mistake. It's like a balloon that pops with the first prick. That means that every single product from every single vendor has to perfectly hide their keys, perfectly implement their code. There can't be a single way to get into the guts of the code to retrieve the cleartext or the keys while it's playing back. All attackers need is a single mistake that they can use to compromise the system.

There is a good quote (taken from schneier.com that I think fits quite well:

But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse."

That quote is about breaking cryptography, but that is a big part of any DRM system too.

Arstechnica have written about this crack as well.

More about OOXML and Denmark

Andy Updegrove have posted more info about OOXML and ISO, here is a snippet:

Q: Got it. So let's get down to business. I hear that Microsoft's Tom Robertson was quoted in eWeek saying that 103 nations have standards bodies "with the authority to act at the ISO on behalf of that country," and that ,"What we see is that only a small handful have submitted comments." MS' Brian Jones also says at his blog that " It sounds like about 18 of the 100+ countries reviewing the standard came back with comments."

So just how big a deal is that, anyway?

A: Well, let's start with the denominator, which is really 66 – not 100+ or 103. Only Principle Members and Observer Members can offer contradictions under the JTC 1 rules, and there are only 27 Principal and 39 Observer Members. By my count, that's 66 – less than 2/3's of Robertson's and Jones' numbers. How about the numerator? Is it 18? Nope. 19? Keep going. It's actually 20.

What these contradictions are isn't known, but they should be made public late this month. It will be quite interesting to see them.

Not too long ago we got a law here in Denmark that made open standards a requirement. How valuable that is depends on how you define "open standards". I would say that in general this is a positive step. In regards to document formats, it seems they are already using PDF 1.5 (which isn't really an open standard, but Adobe has just decided to make it an open standard) and according to this danish article, both ODF and OOXML will be supported and used. It is good to see that ODF is going to be used/supported and to be honest, it is not surprising that OOXML is too because Microsoft Office formats is simply used everywhere. It sucks and it would have been nice if they skipped OOXML and used ODF only + a plugin for MS Office that allowed them to save documents in the ODF format since Microsoft isn't willing to support it natively in their otherwise quite fine Office suite.

QOTD

Jon Stewart from the Daily Show's comment on the medias coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death:

...with cnn going at one point going 90 minutes without a commercial - making the death of ANS a more significant news event than a state of the union address and slightly less than 9/11

Update on the linux kernel monkey log Update on the free Linux driver development offer

A FAQ have been posted about this great offer and it looks like the offer has been heard:

Q: Are companies actually taking you up on this offer?
A: Yes, the initial response to this was amazing, a measurable number of new Linux drivers will be created thanks to this program.

That is just great! I hope it will be a big succes!

Sad news from BBC

Read and weep:

The podcast is both heartening and frustrating. The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham -- the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.

Beryl - 3D effects on a Linux desktop

Here is a nice video of aiglx + Beryl which gives some nice 3D effects or "bling" as some like to call it:

The next release of Ubuntu should include Beryl. It will be interesting to see how they integrate it. I don't know whether it will be available for Kubuntu (which I use), but I hope it will :)

The harder part (I think) will be to find some good uses of this cool new technology. 3D effects are nice and having a nice looking desktop is certainly not a bad thing, but it is also important to keep it usable. In what was can we use it to create a more userfriendly desktop?

Schneier.com: DRM in Windows Vista

Here is a great article by Bruce Schneier about DRM in Vista.

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want. These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure. They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest of the entertainment industry.

And you don't get to refuse them.

Doesn't sound too nice does it? And why would MS add all this DRM to Vista? Well, here is a nice theory:

We saw this trick before; Apple pulled it on the recording industry. First iTunes worked in partnership with the major record labels to distribute content, but soon Warner Music's CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. found that he wasn't able to dictate a pricing model to Steve Jobs. The same thing will happen here; after Vista is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, Sony's Howard Stringer won't be able to dictate pricing or terms to Bill Gates. This is a war for 21st-century movie distribution and, when the dust settles, Hollywood won't know what hit them.

Of course, that is just a theory but I doubt it is far from the truth.

Nikon 18-200mm lens

Review of the Nikon 18-200mm lens. I just got this lens and therefore haven't used it much yet, but so far I agree with him, it is an amazing allround lens.

I’ve never reviewed a camera lens before. I mean, only a fraction of digital camera owners have digital S.L.R.s (the kind that accept interchangeable lenses), only a fraction of those are non-professionals like me, and only some of those shop more than a couple of times for lenses.

But I’ve been working with Nikon’s 18-200 millimeter “superzoom” VR lens, which fits any of its digitals: the D40, D50, D70, D80, D200, and so on. And I can’t stop babbling about it.

The sad part, as the review states, is that it is hard to get. I ordered mine in october last year and only just got it - that translates to more than 3 months delivery time. Funny side note: I ordered it at a company called "Express Delivery" :)

My camera stuff:
Nikon D80 (love it - it's my first SLR and it is amazing! I could have chosen the Canon 400D which is cheaper and have more or less the same specifications but I have no regrets about choosing the D80. I find the Canon a bit confusing to use while the Nikon is a joy and the size and ergonomics of the Nikon is better, at least for my hands)

Lenses:
Nikon 50mm f/1.8 (Cheap little lens, but it's a lot of fun and very sharp - you can take some great shots with it)
Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 (I bought this used at a good price, it is very nice to have and it's what I will be using for taking indoor sports shots)

Russian schools move to Linux

A school in Russia has been cought using pirated software from Microsoft. Whether the school knew it was pirated software or not is unclear, but according to the article, the school will switch to using Linux to avoid this happening again. Not everyone is happy about this though:

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them.

I guess they will have to learn it now, which you could say is what you're supposed to do in a school. You know, learn stuff ;)

Schneier.com: A New Secure Hash Standard

This is good and important news:

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is having a competition for a new cryptographic hash function. This matters. The phrase "one-way hash function" might sound arcane and geeky, but hash functions are the workhorses of modern cryptography. They provide web security in SSL. They help with key management in e-mail and voice encryption: PGP, Skype, all the others. They help make it harder to guess passwords. They're used in virtual private networks, help provide DNS security and ensure that your automatic software updates are legitimate. They provide all sorts of security functions in your operating system. Every time you do something with security on the internet, a hash function is involved somewhere.

And why is this new competition important?

The hash function you're most likely to use routinely is SHA-1. Invented by the National Security Agency, it's been around since 1995. Recently, though, there have been some pretty impressive cryptanalytic attacks against the algorithm. The best attack is barely on the edge of feasibility, and not effective against all applications of SHA-1. But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse." It's past time to abandon SHA-1.

That's why! MD5 has been broken and it looks like SHA-1 is going to be broken sometime in the not too distant future so it important to find a new one. This competition will hopefully result in a lot of research in this area and a good new secure hash standard.

More KDE 4: Part 1/4 about Decibel

Is there some kind of competition going on about writing about KDE 4? Recently lots of KDE 4 related articles have been published on "The Dot" and elsewhere. I'm not complaining though, I love reading about it and I'm really looking forward to KDE 4. The latest article is about Decibel:

People use their computers to communicate with others. Usually, they want to communicate as close to real-time as possible. Email, instant messaging, and Voice over IP (VoIP), are some of the different ways people communicate using their computers. Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses. Ironically, each of these means of communication do not talk very well with other means of communication.

This is where Decibel comes in. Decibel is a service, not an application. The goal of Decibel is to create a bridge between different communication technologies. Decibel will make it easy to integrate real-time communication technologies into applications, Tobias says. Decibel provides a central storage place for settings of real-time communications. This will allow one communication application (say, email) to talk to another communication application (say, instant messaging) without having to learn a new language.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this series for sure :)

KDE 4: Sonnet library

Here is another interesting article about a part of what will eventually become KDE 4. This is about the Sonnet library which I haven't really read about before, but seems to be yet another very nice improvement of KDE and yet another thing which I haven't really seen anywhere else, at least not as nicely integrated as this:

Because Sonnet is a library accessible to all KDE applications, Rideout foresees applications beyond text editing programs. Its language detection feature is particularly ripe for unexpected usage. Sonnet is capable of determining the language a text is written in given about 20 characters of data. This feature already works for several dozen languages. According to Rideout, the Strigi desktop search developers are considering integrating language detection into their application's search features. Perhaps users will, one day, be able to search for "documents written in Spanish within the past week."

Rideout, who recently earned his bachelor's degree in linguistics, says that improved multilingual support is the "most requested change" from KDE 3 and it is here where language detection has the most potential. He says, "Users will be able to have documents checked for correctness in a fine-grained manner. Any separate section of a document (by default, this means a paragraph) will be checked in its respective language by the tools available for that language. For convenience, each section will have its language detected automatically, with the option of a user disabling or overriding the detection."

That is something which have bothered me a bit for quite a while - I write in both danish and english, having a system that automatically figures out what language I'm using would be pretty neat. That this will work and be integrated into the entire desktop is quite nice and I think this is where KDE compares positively with the competition and have done so for quite a few years.

Microsoft ODF Translator v1.0

So, it has been released, but is it any good? The answer seems to be a big NO and maybe more interesting to know is that it will never work:

The abridged version of the story is that XSLT methods for transforming from one dialect of W3C-conforming XML to another dialect of W3C-conforming XML will always work. It is definitional. If it does not work, then one of the "W3C-conforming" dialects is a punk. Well, we and Microsoft know XSLT well enough to know in advance that the design of Microsoft Office Open XML would make it impossible for this, the Clever Age approach, to work for the Translator. Let me say this clearly: Microsoft knew in advance that XSLT would provide shitty tranform from Microsoft Office Open XML to ODF and they funded the Clever Age project to use this method.

None of that is surprising of course, Microsoft is simply trying to protect their big cash cow (MS Office) and they will use any and all tricks in the book to keep their lock-in.

Interesting comment from Apple/Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs just posted a comment on the Apple website called "Thoughts on Music. He starts by mentioning that

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.

What he doesn't mention is that AAC and MP3 isn't exactly open formats - they are quite infected with software patents which means that everyone that wants to play those files have to pay royalties (if you bought an iPod, part of the price is royalties to be able to play MP3 files). Free, open formats do exist - just have a look at the Xiph.org formats like Ogg Vorbis and Flac. There is nobody that prevents Apple from adding support for those formats to their players and no one will demand royalties if they did! They would probably sell even more iPods if they added support for those formats.

He ends by stating the obvious and what everyone else have been saying for years:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

He also says that if the music companies would let them sell music without DRM,

Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

That is positive news from Apple! It is now up to the music companies to do the right thing. The big question is whether they will go for it? I'll believe it when I see it. Why? Because they don't use DRM to stop piracy, they use it so they can sell us the same product again and again.

I got another question: If Apple starts selling DRM free music, will all those unfortunate people that already bought music with DRM be able to download DRM free versions of the music they already bought?

The Road to KDE 4

Troy Unrau has been writing a great series of articles about the next major release of the open source desktop, KDE. The series is called "The Road to KDE" and the latest one is Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier. Phonon should make multimedia work better and more reliable.

Here is a listing of the previous articles (first one at the bottom) which I highly recommend:

Kalzium and KmPlot
Job Progress Reimagined
Full Mac OS X Support
New KOffice Technologies
SVG Rendering in Applications