LookIt

How can they still sell Hummers?

This month's Consumer Reports magazine has a review of "luxury SUVs". I would normally not even look at them, but I noticed that the Hummer H2 was listed, and I thought "maybe there is some redeeming value to what most people think is an anti-environmental piece of shit".

I was wrong. The ratings table for the whole review has 17 vehicles, the first 16 of which get "Overall road-test scores" of 83 down to 61. Number 17, the H2, got a score of 23. And it also got the lowest MPG in the table. And it cost $20,000 more than the number 2 car.

The CR ratings are available online, but not for free; on the other hand, you can probably save the cost of a year's worth of access to the online content ($26, or $19 if you have a magazine subscription) with one purchase based on their comparisons. Having said that, I hope that quoting the first sentence of the H2 review is considered fair use (and good advertising for the magazine, which I have read religiously for 35 years): "The Hummer gets awful fuel economy, handling is ungainly, the brakes are sub-par, and a terrible view makes it difficult to judge the hulking vehicle's position within a traffic lane."

So, when I see someone driving a Hummer, I will not only think of them as environmentally unfriendly, but crappy shoppers as well.

Gnome vs. KDE

Short answer: Gnome.

It has been a few years since I tried using a XWindows desktop, and I thought it was time to see where they stood. After doing a Google search of "gnome vs kde", I found a few articles that said about the same thing: "Gnome is more mature, KDE is a bit less stable and flashier". That sounded believable, so I installed current Ubuntu (which, fortunately for Ubuntu users, comes with Gnome) and Kubuntu (a parallel distribution that comes with KDE).

The reviews were correct: KDE is less stable and flashier. In this case, "flashier" means "useless chrome and cutesy application naming that do not help get real work done".

The KDE folks clearly have not thought this through for typical users. For example, I wanted to change my network settings:

Note that there is no "Administrator Mode button". That's because the window by default comes up with the button (which is at the bottom of the window) not visible, with no indication that the window was resized to cut off the bottom. Gnome doesn't have this kind of lameness; as far as I can tell, you can't resize a window in a way to hide active items.

I'll go with "mature".

Three types of application identity interactions

Applications need information about users at different times for different reasons. This article does a superb job of triaging the interactions.

The VPNC lab

One of the main things that I do at VPNC is interoperability testing of IPsec and SSL VPNs. This type of testing means that VPNC's members have to send me a system and it lives in the VPNC lab for as long as they are members.

So, how does that look? Maybe not so pretty. This is why I rent an office for the lab: I can't imagine having that in my house.

Four types of clouds

This is the first good article I have seen on "cloud computing". Luis Villa gently pulls apart different people's definitions of clouds and analyzes each for hype and potential for lock-in. Well worth reading if you haven't already bought into one view or another.