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Yes, there is plenty of prior art. Sadly, IBM did it first:
http://news.com.com/Probing+IBMs+Nazi+connection/2 009-1082_3-269157.html

And if you use disposable credit card numbers, then even that will be useless to them after your purchase.

Here are some more links.

IBM has an intro piece which leads into a short but interesting set of pages with specifics, genealogy and original press release of the model 5150 and subsequent IBM PC offerings (including the PS/2s).

News.com also has a feature that starts with a Michael Dell interview but frankly it is rather dull.
Much better is the linked previous piece published for the 20th anniversary of the PC.

Digibarn has also a page with a feature and some movies.
They also show the cover of the original brochure for the IBM PC which had a Chaplin lookalike.Unfortunately it's just the cover but I managed to scan the internal pages from my copy and put them on Flickr.

Oh, and... happy birthday, PC! :)

Here are some more links.

IBM has an intro piece which leads into a short but interesting set of pages with specifics, genealogy and original press release of the model 5150 and subsequent IBM PC offerings (including the PS/2s).

News.com also has a feature that starts with a Michael Dell interview but frankly it is rather dull.
Much better is the linked previous piece published for the 20th anniversary of the PC.

Digibarn has also a page with a feature and some movies.
They also show the cover of the original brochure for the IBM PC which had a Chaplin lookalike.Unfortunately it's just the cover but I managed to scan the internal pages from my copy and put them on Flickr.

Oh, and... happy birthday, PC! :)

|Oh, really?

Both Eclipse and Derby are the result of previous shopping sprees by IBM.

Eclipse was developed by the IBM Ottawa Software Lab. This lab started life as OTI, a company which developed Smalltalk technology, that IBM bought in 1996.

Derby is the open-source version of the Cloudscape DB. Cloudscape was a Java DB company which was acquired by Informix in 1999, which was in turn acquired by IBM in 2005.

CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks program had a story on November 19, 2005 on the subject of human exploration vs. robotic probes. It's available at http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/nov19.html with links to OGG Vorbis and MP3 files of the show. Van Allen was interviewed among others.

Of particular note, the Bush administration's plan to send astronauts back to the moon, the de-maintaining of Hubble, and the cost of a Mars mission (one manned trip to the moon to look at rocks = 700 mars explorer missions). While the show itself takes a non-editorial stance and finds interviewees on both side of the debate, one can clearly see that Van Allen is no looney, a bright mind even in his 90's.

One can quickly make the analogies that:

• Looking Glass : Galileo :: Hubble Space Telescope : 21st century scientists
• House arrest : Catholic Church :: Fund diversion : evangelical Bush administration
• Remote sensing probes & space telescope repair : real science investigating cosmology and origin of universe :: human Moon and Mars mission : money wasting diversion from real science, hoping to extend the suspension of disbelief in religion a little longer, by preventing more erosion of the religious god-created, human-centric universe by empirical scientific evidence.

Program Summary

The development of new plans for human exploration of the Moon and Mars has raised an old argument again. Should we be sending humans into space? Many scientists have argued that robotic probes, rovers and satellites have produced far more science at a far lower cost than human astronauts. Will this still be the case as we look beyond Earth orbit?

Space pioneer Dr. James Van Allen, the Regent professor of physics at the University of Iowa, has worked with space probes like the Explorer, Pioneer and Mariner missions since the earliest days of the U.S. space program. In his view, human astronauts are obsolete.

SGI buys Cray in 1996...

http://news.com.com/SGI+buys+supercomputer+vendor+ Cray/2100-1023_3-206180.html

SGI sells Cray in 2000..

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34698,00 .html

This is a nice article that explores how the PC industry might have turned out if Microsoft never came to power as we know it in this world.

For alt-history buffs: "Now, here's an interesting question that looks back 25 years: What if IBM demands an exclusive license to that operating system? One of two things happens: Microsoft and IBM don't get a deal done, or Microsoft caves. Let's follow both scenarios as far as they can go:"

http://news.com.com/The+great+PC+what-if/2010-1042 _3-6102503.html?tag=fd_carsl

Yeah, but. They don't make it easy to hack the box and put fixes or enhancements of GPLed software on the box. Tivo went overboard, and locked down the entire box when they could have done the following alternative...

I think that they must do this considering an FCC ruling made in 2004 that allows TiVo to share their recording to up to 10 other units. Well, how exactly would TiVo be able to comply with that ruling and satisfy the requirements of the GPL? Locking down the box was the obvious choice.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-237517.html

Even I didn't notice that happen. Apparently Tera bought Cray from SGI and changed the name back for recognition purposes.

You could post this in Sumerian and find more readers than in Freespire's core market.
This much at least would be an eye-opener:

you have to wait probably at least one full day for all of this stuff to compile from scratch

Now back to reality:

The OEM system install, the PC as a plug and play appliance, has been the gold standard in the home and soho market for over twenty-five years.

You will not find an OEM or a big box retailer who will touch a distro that relies on gray market codecs for anything.

Oregon family learns high cost of free songs, Homeland Security: Fix your Windows Users are warned again and again that it is safer and cheaper to stay legit. Don't click on that file.

If, for once, they are listening, the Geek has no cause for complaint.

"Hehe, a nokia story, I'll mention n-gage and i'll get +5 funny" stupid slashbot moderators.

In all, 208.6 million desktops, notebooks and x86 servers left factories and workshops in 2005, according to IDC

Nokia remained the worldwide leader with 32.5 percent of all mobile phone sales in 2005 (see Table 2). It now has a market share that is more than double that of its nearest competitor in Europe and Asia, and more than three times its nearest competitor in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa - Gartner (table 2 will tell you that Nokia sold 265M phones last your - more than the combined PC market.

  With 250 Million phones sold annually nokia can afford to make a "flop" like selling "only" 1.5 Million n-gages every now and then. Howabout this for perspective: 1.5M n-gages was more than he amount of palmone treos sold during the same period.

Distant cousin?

Props to MS for giving consumers a choice, definitely would like to see an all-in-one unit too though.

Btw, this announcement slide is decidedly non-xtreme: http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2006/xbox0217_550x413.jp g

That could very well be. Maybe that's why Maynor only pretended to stick an external card in. Let's look at the video more closely (http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6101573.html?tag=ne. vid). He holds up an external card, and slides it into the slot on the left side of the laptop.

The left side of which laptop?

Oh, the black mac book. What? What's that you say?

The black mac book doesn't have any slot that would fit an external wireless card on the left side?

Well what do you know, you're right (see last photo on):

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/wo/0.RSLID?mco=A4791B5D&nclm=MacBook

Could have been usb maybe, but the card is an odd shape for a usb wifi card. I don't have audio on this machine right now so I can't hear the video, but if he claims it's a pccard or pcmcia, then he definitely wasn't exploiting the card he waved around."

Now I'm a big fan of a policy of eventual public disclosure of exploits. The behavior of many big companies have shown that without the pressure of public knowledge of an exploit they will drag their heels about fixing the exploit. However, it is undoubtable that publicly making availible details of an exploit without giving vendors a chance to create a patch increases the number of attackers who are able to execute attacks against that vendor's customers.

Now there are reasonable people who believe this increased danger is pretty much always offset by the benefits of public knowledge of the risk, i.e., a vulnerability you know about is sufficently less risky to justify disclosure. However it is disgustingly biased and misleading to not even acknowledge that some people and companies might reasonably believe total public disclosure harms the end customers. This is especially true when we are talking about the difference between revealing the existance of the exploit and revealing info that might enable someone to copy the exploit.

Moreover, I didn't see the slightest evidence that it was outside pressure that caused this pair not to reveal the details. The tone of this cnet article seems to imply they made the choice themselves to be responsible which seems totally reasonable.

Also I don't understand who would put this pressure on them unless it is the network card manufacturer. Macs, linux and windows machines are supposedly all affected so no one company would take a PR hit relative to others. Unlike the case with the cisco vulnerability.

Yes it's true that vendors tend to be biased toward maintaining their good name. Just like real people they tend to be biased toward the answers that help them out but this is hardly dastardly. True I think they sometimes go to far and chill free speech and harm security research but this seems fairly rare and I see no reason to believe it is happening here.

http://news.com.com/Cablevision+accelerates+broadb and+offering/2100-1034_3-5937233.html?tag=nefd.top

Nothing much has changed, has it? Just yesterday, they were still going to flunk the Acid test. That's the core of this article. If much had changed, I'd expect this guy to have updated the page. M$'s excuse, "we can't change cause that would break compatibility," is as inflexible as it is dishonest. Killing simple protocols has been a stated goal since the 1998 Halloween Papers were acknowledged. They did it wrong, justified that wrongness and have continued along with it.

Performance is not the goal, domination is.

Back in January, related to the story on how the DoJ demands and gets ISP data, AOL had said that "We did not comply with the request made in the subpoena," spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "Instead, we gave the Department of Justice a list of aggregate anonymous search terms that did not include results or any personally identifiable information."

AOL- you need to rethink that phrase personally identifiable, because it doesn't seem to mean what you think it means. You're hiding behind one technical definition of PII, without concern about whether or not the results actually have PII. If you're releasing results with personally identifying information, then you cannot say you're not releasing PII. I'd written in January I'd writen "I question this assumption by Yahoo, AOL, etc. that search terms, by themselves, have no privacy considerations because they've been separated from personal info. What if the search itself contains personal information? Are the search companies deleting the timestamps and randomizing the order of the search terms themselves? Because otherwise I could see personal info showing up." Obviously, half a year later, they still think that replacing a name with a number takes away the PII. They need to have a talk with, say, the Census Department, about why the department will withhold data about *groups* of businesses in a region. Grouped data can easily become PII data if you can tease out characteristics. AOL didn't even group the data!

As always, relevant quotes from the best.essay.evar on why privacy is a fundamental human right: "If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm..."

"...agents of the state in Canada cannot order Canada Post to photocopy the address on every envelope we send, nor can they order bookstores to keep a record of every book we buy, let alone of every page of every magazine we leaf through. There is no reason why they should be able to exercise such powers with regard to every e-mail someone sends or every Web site he or she visits."

"I do not see any reason why e-mails should be subject to a lower standard of privacy protection than letters or telephone calls. And I do not see why Internet browsing should be subject to a lower standard of protection than book purchasing or researching in a reference library. Canadians should not be subject to greater state monitoring or scrutiny just because they choose to use new communication technologies."

Company calls data posting a mistake.
Hmm, I wonder if this "sorry" will be enough

Per this story this past February:

http://news.com.com/Are+Usenet+fans+vulnerable+to+ copyright+lawsuits/2100-1025_3-6043057.html

"As one of the security measures in Vista, Microsoft is adding a mechanism to block unsigned driver software to run on the 64-bit version of the operating system. However, Rutkowska found a way to bypass the shield and get her code to run. Malicious drivers could pose a serious threat because they run at a low level in the operating system, security experts have said."

I've had the Samsung ML-1740 for a few years now. Only needed to replace the toner once. Crystal-clear printing (b&w) (no color -- who really needs that?). Toner is around $80. Expect to find the printer on sale for $99 at your local electronics megastore, or $149 regularly.

I've gone through (no joke) about 10 different [ink|bubble|dot-matrix] printers and the Samsung printer is MUCH better than anything else. Even the more expensive Lexmark laser printers don't have anything on Samsung.

Oh, but this is for home use. For office use, it's a bit slow.

Best thing about it? You don't need to install any crazy drivers. Just plain vanilla Windows print screens. Nothing that talks to you while it's printing or stays eternally in your tray.

Here is a ZDNet Review], my personal review, and their specifications.

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-250632.html

Way to own yourself you stupid little bitch.

Windows users are always accusing Mac users of smugness, but there's nobody more smug than a Windows user observing that one (1) particular security vulnerability has been found for Macs. This strikes me as akin to someone with AIDS being smug because some previously healthy person has caught a cold.

colds

Cognitive dissonance kicking in yet, MacFans?

• Mac sales were up 12 percent compared with last year, during what was considered a poor quarter for the PC market. Apple said 75 percent of all Macs sold during the period used Intel's chips.

• Taiwanese PC maker Acer also continued to gain PC market share on growth that outpaced all other top vendors, IDC said. Gateway shined as its growth topped 15 percent for the second quarter, while Dell remained the PC market leader and gained global market share despite facing tough competition.

Let's see... 100 minus 26... carry the 9... that leaves 74% share left for Intel, right?

I think on of the images there is the guts of the full-body-musical-touch-sensor-thingie. It appears to allow you to touch various parts of your body to activate those specific synths. Bang bang bang...

Maybe you should do some more reading, especially since your last post basically admitted that you hadn't been reading anything previously and were speculating.

Here's a thought, first start with the actual VMI interface: http://www.vmware.com/interfaces/vmi_specs.html

Read that, and see that it's a standardized API

Then read this again (actually for the first time) that I posted earlier

http://news.com.com/VMware-friendly+change+likely+ for+Linux/2100-7344_3-6061019.html?tag=nefd.top where the current stable kernel developer likes VMware's solution of a non-Xen specific implementation, rather than Xen native and everybody else uses shims into Xen to get into the kernel.

Then come back here, after you are informed and not speculating anymore, realizing that when the current stable kernel developer says he agrees with VMware's methodology (a common VM layer rather than a specific one to Xen), that you were seriously incorrect. That you are saying that the person responsible for the stable kernel is incorrect because it goes against the philosophy of the kernel. You are just so incorrect it's actually hurting me.

• Frames
• Exercising your cat
• Swinging on a swing
• Interacting with your computer
• unique innovations in astrological tarot and in alpha-numerology

"Is Google planning to build a global fiber-optic network from scratch? And, if so, why?"

http://news.com.com/Google+wants+dark+fiber/2100-1 034_3-5537392.html

"Granted, when you operate an Internet company with Google's size, reach, and product portfolio, it's a no-brainer that lots and lots of bandwidth is required."

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=ligh treading&doc_id=65454

Is that Google won't have to pay above and beyond their already astronomical bandwidth costs.

Remember, the Telco line is that Google is making a fortune using their networks & they are getting nothing out of it. They are currently hoping people ignore/don't know that while you pay for your connection, the site you connect to is also paying - again the whole double dip thing.

The telcos got over $5B in tax credits/subsidies in order to improve the network - they promised 40Mbps. Now they say that unless they can get more money by charging for priority and bandwidth, they can't improve the network. I know that $5B only runs so much fiber ($1M/mile in urban areas), but since up to 70% of fiber is unlit (2005 data) I don't think the problem is running more fiber.

Personnally, I think that the next time some telco asshat says they don't make any money from Google, Google should have a press conference with a printed hardcopy of it's entire montly bandwidth bill. I figure opening the backdrop curtain to reviel a dumptruck of paper being poured onto the stage should get the idea across.

moron.

not to sound rude or anything, but they did, and it failed miserably

I think the problem was that Xen source was pushing a design that was exclusive to Xen, no other hypervisor could use it's option. VMware, Microsoft, wouldn't be able to use it, it would be custom just to Xen. I guess that you maybe think that the kernel should have 50 or so different hypervisor product specific interface is a better solution than a generalized hypervisor.

In addition to the topic links here's another.

http://news.com.com/VMware-friendly+change+likely+ for+Linux/2100-7344_3-6061019.html

Which is why I said nearly all. Other videogame laws have been proposed on local, state or national levels by Joe Baca, Leland Yee, Rod Blagojevich, and Roy Burrell just to name the few laws I can remember. Then there are people like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton who have both threatened to propose videogame violence laws.

That's not entirely true. Xen 3 can use Intel's VT-x technology for operating systems like Windows. As long as Windows is a guest OS under the system, you should be able to get it to work.

Xen demonstrate Windows running on top of Xen using an Intel processor with VT

"Microsoft has teamed with the developers of the open source Xen product to gang up on server slicing leader VMware"

From their 2004 press releases:

http://www.taborcommunications.com/hpcwire/hpcwire WWW/04/0827/108259.html
http://news.com.com/Japan+designers+shoot+for+supe rcomputer+on+a+chip/2100-1008_3-5322558.html
http://www.peta.co.jp/md2/faq_en.html
http://grape.astron.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/grape/computer .htm
http://www.primidi.com/2004/09/01.html

Some info about the chip. (Note: the article is old) http://news.com.com/Japan+designers+shoot+for+supe rcomputer+on+a+chip/2100-1008_3-5322558.html/ From the original posting: "How do experts rate the MDGrape-3? Alan Gara, chief architect for BlueGene/L at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., had this to say: "It's an unusual architecture. In BlueGene/L all chips can communicate with each other. In our largest BlueGene we have 65,000 nodes, with 130,000 processors. They didn't need to do that. [MDGrape-3 has 4,808 chips.] "They also built a processor that did only the type of calculations they need to do in astrophysics. So they built a specialized processor and a specialized network. It's a good example. It shows how cost- and power-efficient you can be if you build for a specific applications. We can learn from it. They've set a benchmark of power performance." While Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at Berkeley Lab and editor of the Top500 Supercomputer Sites, weighed in with this: "When we say 1 petaflop, it's just a number. It's the same as if you were to run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. But it does mean something because it's a barrier to break through. The fact is we've reached the petaflop threshold. Others will follow. In computing, a matter of three to four years can change things."" Although specialized, this supercomputer deserves the credit.

JavaScript malware is opening the door for hackers to attack internal networks

I wouldn't complain too much. Women are getting entire technology related websites trying to cater specifically towards them while men are still stuck with being the subjects of asinine studies conducted by members of our gender obsessed society who think some of "the dudes" are stepping too close to the edge of their gender role.

Yes, there was/is an amnesty. It applies at least to machines that had Windows pre-installed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6590518/
http://www.betanews.com/article/NonLegit_Windows_U sers_Get_Amnesty/1115239342
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+proposes+piracy+amne sty/2100-1016_3-5466487.html
Cheers!

Ok first off, here is another article on the subject with pictures! : http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6098853.html?tag=n efd.top

So it gives you more of an idea, yes it is HIGH DEF, but the screen is larger because the sleeve has it's own.

Here's how it looks inside so it gives you an idea : http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6099056-2.html?tag =ne.gall.pg

Anyways I will let you guys debate over this some more to draw your own conclusions as to what this exactly is.

Ok first off, here is another article on the subject with pictures! : http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6098853.html?tag=n efd.top

So it gives you more of an idea, yes it is HIGH DEF, but the screen is larger because the sleeve has it's own.

Here's how it looks inside so it gives you an idea : http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6099056-2.html?tag =ne.gall.pg

Anyways I will let you guys debate over this some more to draw your own conclusions as to what this exactly is.

The summary for the article is misleading. IE7 is not simply installed automatically like any other critical update. Instead, the user is prompted explicitly with a clear, colorful, simple prompt which explains what IE 7 is and gives the user an option to install the update. The article has a screenshot.

I personally felt that http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2006/726spam_plants04_55 0x550.jpg was a vision sent from the Flying Spaghetti Monster of his Noodleiness. But that's just me.

All the clause effectively says is that the information disclosed at the conference is not confidential.

FTA ~ "They ask us to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and if we say anything in those meetings that Microsoft is able to use, they have the right to do so."

Doesn't this go against the whole idea of a nondisclosour agreement?

Does anybody see what I see? Hmmm...

Image 2 looks pretty cool, a cross between hens-and-chicks and ice plant or maybe an anemone

Image 1 looks like something those m3dz are supposed to do for the below average male.

Image 6 reminds me of something I pulled out of the liver of a lake perch (wonder how that thing lived, make sure you cook fish thoroughly!)

Image 2 looks pretty cool, a cross between hens-and-chicks and ice plant or maybe an anemone

Image 1 looks like something those m3dz are supposed to do for the below average male.

Image 6 reminds me of something I pulled out of the liver of a lake perch (wonder how that thing lived, make sure you cook fish thoroughly!)