YES! Virtual Windows machines for Mac OS on the horizon!

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/computers/0,70604-0.html

It'll be a month or few before they're available, which means that by the time that I can afford to get a nice Mac Intel laptop, they should be stable!

I was pretty confident these wouldn't be too far away once Apple announced their Boot Camp system.

I'm boycotting D-Link networking products

I've owned their products and I've always had problems with them. I definitely prefer Linksys and Cisco when it comes to networking equipment. In fact, Cisco rather liked Linksys and bought them out.

Here's what's going on. A man in Denmark set up a free NTP server for the Danish internet backbone. This is a network where Danish routers exchange information, you cannot get a server hosted at that connection, this is a meta-connection that makes everything talk to each other. An NTP server provides extremely precise time information to keep the routers synchronized, the server has an atomic clock or receiver connected to it that gives it time accuracy within a few microseconds. He did this for free because (a) he's a time geek, and (b) Denmark doesn't have a national laboratory reference to provide this service to Danish backbone providers.

Here's where D-Link enters the picture. They released several series of routers and other internet appliances that access this guy's NTP server. This is putting traffic on that backbone that no one else should be accessing. It is thoroughly documented that this server is for the exclusive service of people who pay a stiff annual access fee to be on that backbone, yet D-Link copied the server name and put it in the list of valid time servers that their routers could access.

The resulting hit on traffic, lawyer's fees, unbillable hours that this guy has lost, etc. have cost him directly and indirectly between $7,300 and $16,000 US. That's what the cost would be if he shut down the server right now. If he leaves the server up, it will cost him over $60,000 over the next five years, the expected time frame for the specific models to age out and fall off the internet.

D-Link has been less than responsive and have not fixed the problem. This is not a difficult fix, D-Link has to modify the firmware images to remove the reference to his server. That's it. As people upgrade their routers, that router will no longer access the Danish NTP server.

But D-Link hasn't done this, and his server is continuing to take hits. The silly thing about this is that they are, if not constantly, frequently updating these images. The actual amount of work to remove this reference is almost trivial, even if it's spread over 20-30 models. It's one line in a list of servers, all they have to do is delete one line.

This isn't the first time this type of thing has happened, a few years ago Netgear blasted the University of Wisconsin off the face of the earth.


Anyway, I'm actively boycotting them for now. I have co-workers who help people install wireless networks, and I'll be talking to them today and tomorrow and encouraging them to not recommend D-Link products until this is resolved.

More info at http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/.

The Wikipedia Birthday Meme

An interesting concept. Go to Wikipedia, type in your birthday without the year (December 16 for me), and report back on interesting events, births, and deaths that happened on your birthday. Limit yourself to three of each if you like, me, I’m not so good at the counting.

Events
1392 - History of Japan: Nanboku-cho - Emperor Go-Kameyama abdicates in favor of rival claimant Go-Komatsu.
1598 - Seven Year War: Battle of Noryang Point - Admiral Yi Sun Sin's outnumbered Korean navy ambushes and defeats Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Japanese fleet.
1653 - English Interregnum: The Protectorate - Oliver Cromwell becomes Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
1773 - American Revolution: Boston Tea Party - Members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawks dump crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
1944 - World War II: Battle of the Bulge - General Dwight D. Eisenhower's allied forces and Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt's German army engage in the Belgian Ardennes.
1997 - The Pokémon episode Electric Soldier Porygon triggers attacks of photosensitive epilepsy in hundreds of Japanese children.


Births
1485 - Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England (d. 1536)
1770 - Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer (d. 1827)
1899 - Sir Noel Coward, British playwright, actor and composer (d. 1973)
1917 - Sir Arthur C. Clarke, British writer
1927 - Randall Garrett, American writer
1928 - Philip K. Dick, American writer (d. 1982)


Deaths
705 - Empress Wu of Zhou (China; b. 625)
1859 - Wilhelm Grimm, German writer and folklorist (b. 1786)
1916 - Grigori Rasputin, Russian monk (b. 1869)
1965 - W. Somerset Maugham, British writer (b. 1874)
1980 - Colonel Harland Sanders, American fast food entrepreneur (b. 1890)
1989 - Lee Van Cleef, American actor (b. 1925)


I knew about the Boston Tea Party and Beethoven, I found a lot of the others quite interesting.

Did you miss out on cool web site pranks on April 1?

Wikipedia cataloged a lot of them! I'm going to make note of some that did cool stuff so that I can look at them next April Fool's Day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1,_2006