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Wasting resources trying to attack a ghost like Linux, where there is no one corp they can go after...

But they keep attacking, don't they? TomTom, Novell, Lindows, other attacks from 1998 to 2007.

And, since 2003 MS has considered Linux their number two threat.

Microsoft disagrees with you.

I work as a Linux Administrator, and have supported several Fortune 100 companies. They usually actually purchase annually renewing RedHat licenses (read phone/email support and updates). The last time I checked, 2008, Red Hat was the largest contributor to the Linux kernel.

...this does not apply to Mac users, because Mac's don't suffer from drive-by downloads and other malware. My PPC G5 running Safari on Snow Leopard is rock-solid and secure.

I take it you haven't heard the news? Granted, it's much more secure...but not secure.

People think that Mac's are expensive, but the safety and security alone are reasons to justify the high price. The sleek, advanced looks are just the icing on the cake.

Uh...OSX is what is safe and secure...not Apple hardware. Install OSX onto a hackintosh and it will be just as secure as your overpriced "icing". Macs ARE expensive, and the low-cost of upgrading to Snow Leopard just proves that you are paying far too much for hardware, not the software that it utilizes.

Come on. If you are gonna fanboy for a single system, at least get your facts straight.

Being a MS apologist doesn't get you paid. Writing for an influential tech blog could get you a free high-end laptop loaded with MS' latest OS though.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6146463-7.html

As I recall, the Chinese government has access to the Windows source code. Google's been claiming that the Chinese government launched the attacks, and security experts have backed them up. The obvious conclusion is that having the source gave the Chinese government the opportunity to develop a new attack against Windows.

While some might see this as an argument against Open Source security products, I see exactly the opposite. The closed source made it possible for the only party with the source to gain an advantage. In products where the source is available to everyone, there is no advantage to any party. Therefore the holes are found and sealed, instead of left to fester, like this one was.

While that may have made it easier for them, it does not explain the numerous hackers and script kiddies who have managed to compromise IE7/8 and Vista/Win7 security, even on default configurations; as they did not have access to the source code.

The rest, though I agree with ("holes are found and sealed, etc") is also contingent on other factors when Microsoft is involved.
(1) Holes are only "sealed" when enough media attention is drawn to them - otherwise it's when Microsoft gets around to it, if ever.
(2) The holes are generally poorly patched, and not truly sealed (see the half dozen MAJOR (and tons of minor) .NET fixes to deal with the RCE exploits, where after each one, a very similar exploit was found because the hole was never properly patched, or there were dozens of others that were skipped).

No, I am not trying to bash Microsoft... there are enough others here to do that. I am simply pointing out history as it happened. Every statement above has historical backing to it (#2 I even provided one of many examples).

In the U.S., we get access to government data by default when it's convenient.

When it is not, we get stiffed. Witness the ACTA fiasco. And we will get stiffed on this one if we don't keep up the pressure, and get Congress out of the habit of passing legislation they can't even bother to read.

England still has an Official Secrets Act far as I know. How's that working out for ya?

If it's any consolation, we don't bother with that in the U.S., really. We just fight it out in the courts.

I think for a tablet with detachable keyboard there might be, like this one from Always Innovating:
http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20090302/AI-front_610x405.png

but I don't see one just for a tablet.... the form factor always seems like one of those "neat-o" ideas until you actually try to make use of it.

Remember back in the day when Google came out? They practically killed their competitors (Yahoo, Altavista, MSN) in 2 years.

I remember when Google came out and killed their competitors (Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo, etc...). However, your list includes an entry that didn't exist when Google entered the market...

In 2005 they gained over 20% in 6 months,

[citation needed]

ComScore Networks reported that Google had a 6% (from 36.3% to 42.3%) increase between February 2005 and February 2006.

As I recall, the Chinese government has access to the Windows source code. Google's been claiming that the Chinese government launched the attacks, and security experts have backed them up. The obvious conclusion is that having the source gave the Chinese government the opportunity to develop a new attack against Windows.

While some might see this as an argument against Open Source security products, I see exactly the opposite. The closed source made it possible for the only party with the source to gain an advantage. In products where the source is available to everyone, there is no advantage to any party. Therefore the holes are found and sealed, instead of left to fester, like this one was.

Microsoft has given the Chinese government preferential access to the Windows Source code. They even set up a lab of security researchers to look for vulnerabilities in the code. I don't think leaks onto the internet have anything to do with it. It's kind of like all the possible disadvantages of OSS with none of the advantages.

Microsoft has given the Chinese government preferential access to the Windows Source code. They even set up a lab of security researchers to look for vulnerabilities in the code. I don't think leaks onto the internet have anything to do with it. It's kind of like all the possible disadvantages of OSS with none of the advantages.

What I know is that when Sprint and Nextel first merged, my service with Sprint went down the tubes. I was living in a small town at least an hour away in every direction from a major city. With Sprint I could get coverage everywhere, even the places that no one else could. Then they merged and my service went from the best to unusable. I started dropping a lot of calls. There were actual places along the road that I would drop a call every time I passed it. And it always seemed I was on the phone at that point. I called Sprint to complain. Apparently during the switchover it caused a problem with the closest tower to drop 93% of the calls throughout the area. It took them months to fix. They refused to let me out of my contract, even though I could hardly use my phone. I used to think that I would never switch from Sprint. That experience left such a bad taste that I will never go back to them. I couldn't even get one of the letters from Sprint saying that they didn't want me as a customer anymore, even though I had called and complained on numerous occasions. http://news.cnet.com/2300-1036_3-6195014-1.html

Some TVs connect directly to the internet

[daleg@iridium]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS4/File Formats/Camera Raw.plugin/Contents/MacOS$ strings Camera\ Raw | grep -i copyright
Copyright 2009 Adobe Systems, Inc.
Copyright 2008 Adobe Systems, Inc.
17CCopyrightMLUCTag
Copyright %4d Adobe Systems Incorporated
$$$/Private/CRaw/About/Copyright=^C ^0 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
copyright
xmpDM:copyright
COPYRIGHT : Copyright (c) 2002-2007, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe XMP Core Copyright (c) 2002-2007, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright
tiff:Copyright
Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright (c) Eastman Kodak Company, 1999, all rights reserved.
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 2005 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 2006 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright 1999 Adobe Systems Incorporated
Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company
Copyright 2000 Adobe Systems, Inc.
13CCopyrightTag

While probably not definitive, I would expect to see a salutation to Mr. Coffin and dcraw in there if there were dcraw bits present. There is one other binary installed with ACR, a library by the name of NkMiniLib.dylib. Given the name I would suppose this is a library containing the properly-licensed smarts required for ACR to decrypt Nikon NEF files. I admit that this is a hunch on my part, but I think it's a good one given the known circumstances around Nikon as a company and its RAW format - Nikon would rather you buy their Capture NX 2 software for RAW file manipulation. I can only imagine how much Adobe paid or pays for licensing the ability to do this in ACR (and by extension - in Lightroom and Photoshop.)

It is also well-known that Adobe's ACR team creates the profiles that plug into ACR for each camera, they don't lift them from dcraw. It's likely they get samples from manufacturers in advance or soon after a camera's release to divine the profile themselves for release in a future version of ACR.

So color me not convinced, regardless of what Mr. Coffin might put on his resume. In the course of "googling around" I cannot find one authoritative bit of info linking ACR to dcraw. ACR as it stands today doesn't appear to have a whiff of dcraw in it judging from some minor binary snooping... so until proven otherwise, I'd say that millions of photographers wordwide do not use his code as you might claim.

People drilled Apple for not having feature x, y and z. Now after several OS updates and all the features added, people still drill Apple for not having them from day one!

Sorry but the iPhone is the better smartphone. Don't take my word for it, but Nokia's.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10423779-17.html
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/01/04/nokia.claims.new.hardware.and.services.key/
http://www.techmeme.com/100104/p17

The question is, in 2011 will they match where Apple is now, or where Apple will be then?

Coincidentally, I recently came across this independently surveyed coverage for the big 4 across the U.S. It's done by a group called Root Wireless, who I'd never heard of before, and can be interactively viewed here:

  http://reviews.cnet.com/coveragemap/

It looks like they are going use users/customers to gather data for them (I sure would participate) but for now, the voice coverage map is pretty thorough while the 2G/3G ones are a little light (this is in the part of Los Angeles where I live that I looked). It jibes pretty well with my experience in the area, and it better than any coverage map that I've seen from the carrier themselves (that always shows excellent coverage :p ).

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10302038-37.html
http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/missing-prototype-iphone-leads-to-chinese-workers-death/
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/14/211242
http://timecapsuledead.org/

Apple has a long history of threatening decenters against its 'grand vision', there have been multiple instances where large chunks of their own support forums have been purged because users were critisizing Apple for their laptops keys melting (suspend issue) or their ipods burning or their laptop power adapters failing or their timecapsule powerbricks dieing after almost exactly a year. All of these took massive user lashback to get fixed inside warrenty in some cases these defective products never were.

The story of the iPod above retells that in order to get a replacement they had to agree not to reveal that the product had a fault ever. This is the kind of behaviour that is acceptable to you? How many other stories have never been told thanks to Apple raverous lawyers?

If you think that the arrogance of Apple only exists in my mind then you need to get your rampant fanboyisum in check and read more of the internet than what is released in Apple press releases.

Then how about a recently published top ten list of the countries with the fastest broad band?

Of course the fact that MSFT let the chinese view the source code for http://news.cnet.com/China-looks-into-Windows-code/2100-1016_3-5083458.html windows. Has nothing to do with it. Sure it was 6 years ago, the question is how long was china running the operation and how many field tests did they get away with and for how long?

Something like this has been in at least limited operation for a couple of years.

Saw this a few days ago, never can tell what to believe.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10434099-17.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

I was watching 3D Avatar with two my friends and not once they had to take off glasses. Nor they had any problems after the movie.

According to the recent article on the topic, 4-10% of people have the problem.

Are you saying that microsoft gave the chinese government the source code to IE/Windows?

Apparently they did -- or at least let them inspect/study it:

http://news.cnet.com/China-looks-into-Windows-code/2100-1016_3-5083458.html

Large national governments actually have enough leverage to get access to sourcecode that's not publicly available.

http://news.cnet.com/China-looks-into-Windows-code/2100-1016_3-5083458.html. The microtrolls are bad enough of the mods but leave the out and out lies alone it looks silly.

First, google's servers each have their own battery, so it's unlikely that all the servers in a DC will go down at once. If only a few go down, their redundancy means that it's not a big deal - they can wait for the fsck. And moreover, even if an entire DC goes down (eg, due to cooling loss) they have the redundancy needed to deal with entire datacenter failures - with that kind of redundancy, fscking is only a minor inconvenience (plus with a cooling failure they might have time to sync and umount before poweroff...)

LOL reality must be biased too, then.

Remember how they "complied" with the - stupid - EU required ballot screen.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10363306-75.html

Remember how they basically discredited ISO with the ooxml "do this as word95" standard.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsoft-Office-2007-is-incompatible-with-OOXML/0,130061733,339288332,00.htm

And remember MS own internal memos, halloween documents and all.

Here's a nice old story about a Microsoft software user that got audited, sued, fined and dragged through the press. Apparently they sell guitars. Of course a loss for somebody is naturally a win for somebody else.

For those who forgot:

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.htm

In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs. Ball settled for $65,000, plus $35,000 in legal fees. But by then, the BSA, a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licensing provisions for major business software makers, had put the company on the evening news and featured it in regional ads warning other businesses to monitor their software licenses. Humiliated by the experience, Ball told his IT department he wanted Microsoft products out of his business within six months. "I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,'" recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. "We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly."

Read all the little bits, people...

2005: Google starts buying up dark fiber.

2007: Google buying land in middle of nowhere, near power stations, building data centers.

Now throw in GoogleTalk, Wave, Phone, Chrome, Android...and now the Nexus-1?

My hypothesis for the next 5 years of Google:

1. Become an ISP, like ComCast, TimeWarner, etc...
2. Become a telco like Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, etc...
3. Become a broadcaster like ABC, NBC, FOX, etc...
4. Become a wireless provider like T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, etc...

Pay close attention, folks. This is going to happen, and it's going to happen fast.

Well thanks to this ruling we can say goodbye to all remaining on board snacks. Guess I'll bring my own peanuts. Unless they will be considered a prohibited substance.

I wonder when our dear farmers are going to grow these allergy-free peanuts so we get over all this nonsense.

...someone they can scare with random stuff that never really happens...

• Yes, I suppose that
• you must be entirely
• right, despite the
• easily Googled evidence
• to the contrary.
• Of course, Googling is a rare skill, and one can't
• expect everyone to grasp it.

That, by the way, was a hit directly on your head with the clue-bat. :)

...someone they can scare with random stuff that never really happens...

• Yes, I suppose that
• you must be entirely
• right, despite the
• easily Googled evidence
• to the contrary.
• Of course, Googling is a rare skill, and one can't
• expect everyone to grasp it.

That, by the way, was a hit directly on your head with the clue-bat. :)

You can't get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good

Yes, god forbid someone in the government actually try and help people. We must put a stop to this at once! The U.S. government should only work to protect the corporate profit, as it has been for the last thirty years.

I mean really, why don't these judges just go out and admit they're on comcast's payroll already? Somebody should tar and feather those judges. Gah, I'm so sick and tired of regulatory capture. When will it all end? S

Here is a non-pay link with the same info.

Just wait until someone clicks an FBI honeypot link and see how smart you are.

whom I like and trust not to download kiddie porn

Because pedophiles never lead otherwise normal lives. They all have no friends and are immediately suspected by everyone. Right?

I have yet to see any of these games where movements are anything resembling natural.

Microsoft Natal Video

The breakout game shows a transparent representation of yourself mirroring instantly every move, at least in 2D. But what I found interesting was the driving game where you grip an imaginary steering wheel and drive. But the accelerator is apparently moving your foot towards the screen and back which means 3D controls.

Which is one step closer to finally becoming a Jedi Warrior.

There's a 64 bit Photoshop for Windows and not for OSX. Surprisingly, it gives serious performance gains over the 32 bit binary, on the order of 20-30%. OSX will get a 64 bit binary before long, I assume, but for now OSX is substantially slower on the same hardware for Photoshop

Nope, not even close except for the edge case of opening a 3GB file

Based on Adobe's preliminary testing, the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 will give a performance kick of about 8 percent to 12 percent compared with the 32-bit version, Nack said. For one particular task--opening up a huge 3.2-gigapixel file on a system with a lot of memory--the 64-bit version is 10 times faster because it doesn't have to write the data that won't fit in memory onto a relatively slow hard drive.

Quote from here although it's all over the Internet.

Sorry.

I got one of these netgear ones recently and it works great.

I can set up different access through it...and even click to allow guests, etc.

I have some old computers that just can't get anything stronger than WEP to run on them (an old iBook for instance), so I set up a WEP connection for them, which the router blocks off from direct interaction with any other computer on my system...everything else is WPA2.

There are wireless routers out there that do some neat things, but you gotta be willing to spend more than $20.

The original article is here.

Maybe it's about time that the standard consumer camcorder takes video in full HD for a decent price? I'd like to see that first.

Your wish is my command. So how was this last year you spent in a cave?

Tigerdirect has that first model on sale for $500. That seems to me to be a pretty decent price... unless you're one of those "Let me know when I can get [product X] with [feature Q], [feature R], and two [feature S] for $99".

Maybe it's about time that the standard consumer camcorder takes video in full HD for a decent price? I'd like to see that first.

Your wish is my command. So how was this last year you spent in a cave?

Tigerdirect has that first model on sale for $500. That seems to me to be a pretty decent price... unless you're one of those "Let me know when I can get [product X] with [feature Q], [feature R], and two [feature S] for $99".

/. should probably change the link to this to the original author, Ina Fried at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10426627-56.html?tag=mncol

Aviran's plagiarism shouldn't benefit from slashdotting.

Covered it exactly. TFA is just plagiarized from cnet.

The author stole his text from a CNET article by Ina Fried. Update the link to point to the original article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10426627-56.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10426627-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Identical to the summary link, except from the actual source.

Yeah, who needs compilers that make the best code they can, phones that don't crash and know what year it is? Who needs free software when you can patent software licensing itself?

Let us instead ignore the freedom of the platform and look at the Oooh shiny.

Yeah, who needs compilers that make the best code they can, phones that don't crash and know what year it is? Who needs free software when you can patent software licensing itself?

Let us instead ignore the freedom of the platform and look at the Oooh shiny.

They don't have to put it on the iPhone.

But it will be on your iPhone. ATSC-M/H is an IP based system, and there will be a device called Tivit that will receive an ATSC-M/H IP stream, and rebroadcast it over WiFi to your iPhone, Touch, PC, etc.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10425455-56.html

this is affecting me and the other 3 guys on the planet with a Windows Mobile phone, too. :(

aren't these the scanners known to have health risks and/or not work?

Worse than that, I find it extremely unlikely that not a single bit failed in uncorrected memory during the whole 116 days...
see for instance:here

Essentially, your argument applied in Canada, was used in Canada, and the people won at the Supreme Court. As a result, downloading files for personal use is largely legal in Canada. Uploading of files is still a grey area.

Then some artists pointed out that the Canadian music industry hasn't been properly paying royalties on some of the CDs it has been selling. In fact, they have been selling CDs without a proper contract in place at all. As such, a bunch of the large Canadian record companies are on the hook for billions in liabilities.

Effectively, in Canada, the recording industry has been violating it's own anti-copying laws. Things are very different in Canada, as opposed to the U.S. The recording companies are being chased by the musicians! For non-payment of royalties!!!