XGL Compiz Window manager for Linux

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If you’ve seen the future of UIs with Vista, Mac and Linux (search this site for ‘cube’) you know that Compiz with the flying cubes wins hands down – looks very very cool.

There is, however some confusion as to how to get it to run – it’s not trivial, but not so hard either.

One thing you need to know is that Compiz has forked into two projects:

1) Compiz (vanilla by Novell)
2) Beryl (formerly Compiz-QuinnStorm, the branch which the users have split off due to users building more and more of their own plugins).

Debian Unstable allows you to install compiz-vanilla.
They are still working on a Beryl package.

Ubuntu allready has a Beryl package. The installation wiki is here.

Vista woes

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Vista is upsetting everyone, with rumours that you can’t turn off the starting sound or have access to the kernel etc. but now it’s getting quite serious.

First, Patchguard has been compormised by Authentium prompting a backlash from Redmond stating that companies have no business even trying to compromise the kernel protection because it makes things unsafe for the Vista customer. Like private individuals aren’t going to try? And succeed?

Now the new EULA has become a draconian affair, royally screwing the customer – 2 of the 6 versions are not allowed to be installed on a virtualised environment and the Ultimate version is not allowed to play DRM protected content on a virtualised environment. Besides that you will only be allowed to install Vista on 2 PCs (ie transfer it to one new PC) and after that you can throw the licence key to Vista away and buy another one.

One of the discussions here

Another here.

Terrorist Profiling TIA2

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In their quest for global domination in the Global Big Brother State of USA, they’ve come to the conclusion that all of their seperate profiling and tracking systems don’t work, so what they’re gonna do is combine them all into one huge system called TIA 2. This will supposedly not use personal information (hahahahaha) and no US civilian information (hahahaha) or illegal phonetapping information (hahahaha) or anything else that would make this monster system actually work (hahahaha). Oh and they can’t define ‘normal’ behavior, so they’re not going to even try. They’re just going to follow ‘deviant’ behavior. Whatever that is. Unless it means all behavior.
This link has a very good read on the functionalities of the system.

The paper, called the TANGRAM Proposer’s Information Packet (PIP) they based it on is to be found here.

(This is the government site URL link to the word document)

RFID Credit Cards

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Yes, after having proven time and again that RFID is not safe (it’s easily readable and copyable) those twits at the credit card companies have helped enable fraud on a massive scale by deploying RFID on credit cards. Naturally none of your data is protected at all (like, for example encryption) and (almost) all the necessary data to make a credit card purchase is on the chip. Of course that didn’t take too long to make a workable hack of and over 20 credit cards (which is every one the researchers tried) were vulnerable. Easily. You could just tatoo you credit card on your forehead, but that would be too difficult for criminals – they’d have to copy the data using writing or pictures.

Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk

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Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once the buffer is full, data is transferred to the platters to free up room. Large files will be streamed directly to the platters. They’re starting with 128 and 256 MB of flash memory on the drives. Unfortunately the drives will only be compatible with Windows Vista, due to the memory management technologies employed in the OS. Samsung is specifically catering to laptop users first using this technology as the idea is that not spinning up the platters will also make a significant power saving.