I'd just like to contrast an example of a win and a fail in relation to dealing with security issues.

Win. A student found a vulnerability in Wicd that could result in unauthorised root access. That vulnerability was patched pretty much the same day most sites reported the problem.

Fail! On the other hand, we have the Flashback trojan which apple have only just released tools to fix. I found a report of it's existence going back to September last year...
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I've been messing with Virtualbox a bit lately. I just thought I'd share my observations.

Windows Vista Business guest. - Took hours to install and many, many hours to apply all the updates! Tends to slow the host machine (Dell Optiplex 740, 4GB RAM, Mepis 11 64 bit.) to a crawl. Runs OK in itself...

Ubuntu 10.04 guest. - Installed and updated in 2 hours tops. Runs great and doesn't seem to impact the host machine's performance very much at all!

Last week, I semi retired my N900 replacing it with a Samsung Galaxy SII. Initial impressions are that the SGS2 is very nice and all but it doesn't have the same 'feel' as the Nokia. My N900 is without doubt a small computer with phone functionality. The SGSII is a smartphone. There is a subtle but distinct difference.

So, the N900 will live on at home with the sim removed but connected to my wireless network. I see it fulfilling various roles, one of which will be as a device...

I was answering a question the other day about the difference between mid-range (AS/400)and mainframe systems. I touched on how the OS differed but then it occurred to me that Linux will run on everything from big iron to a Raspberry Pi! To the best of my knowledge, there is no other OS that will do that!

My second observation is that there is pretty much no decent, easily found, basic documentation for Windows administrators. Try Googling for basic admin guides for Linux and then...

In the past, I posted on why I don't hate Microsoft. I must have been feeling generous back then, because on reflection, there isn't a lot to like with that company... Here's a couple of recent news articles that illustrate what I mean.

The first one Is the Windows 8 UEFI secure boot debacle. (Here's an excellent blog post on the subject.) My concern is that Microsoft will quite happily mandate that hardware manufacturers enable secure boot by default and then let their 'partners'...