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I have been teaching IT courses for the past 13 years. The drop-off in enrollments, beginning in 2001, has been remarkable.

Talking one-on-one with students, I have found that the prospect of losing a job -- or of not being able to get one in the first place -- because of competition from lower-paid employees both here and abroad is causing students to switch careers away from IT. And who could blame them? Working hard to earn a degree only to have the job market flooded by lower-paid employees is discouraging.

This indirect effect of hiring H-1B employees is one that doesn't get much discussion. Maybe it is time that it did, because we are losing the ability to compete technically with European and Asian countries.

Danny Clarke
Instructor, math and computer science
Truckee Meadows Community College
Reno, Nev.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=334764

The EC is demanding that Microsoft "redesign" its OS to allow equal competition of browsers on the desktop. This is sort of like the FTC ordering GM to allow a free choice of stereos in its cars, rather than ship cars with only its (former) in-house brand of Delco.

Yet, knowledgeable users are not restricted from installing their own choice of browser, e.g. Firefox, and just ignoring IE completely. So, the main thrust of the EC's argument is that ignorant users need to have a choice put right in front of them, to force them to not be sheep.

This decision by the EC comes at a time when Microsoft's stock price has dipped under $18, which is where it was in the late 1990s. Bill Gates, the founder of the company and chief executive throughout MSFT's monopolistic phase, has left the company and is busily donating his great wealth to charities all over the world. Microsoft's revenue is down, and its grip on the browser market is slipping in the face of natural and normal competition by products like Firefox, Safari, and--soon, perhaps--Chrome. Increasingly, mobile devices are incorporating browsers and IE is not number one in this market; Opera for example has focused strongly on the handheld market, and Apple, Google, and Palm are attempting to dominate this niche with their new non-Microsoft products.

All in all, it seems like a silly time to implement a monopoly-busting decision that had its roots in a bygone era when Microsoft was truly dominant. Today Microsoft is increasingly looking like a dinosaur, like GM, its products coasting along on past momentum with some slick non-Windows OS's coming up fast on some of these new netbooks and handhelds. It's a new era and the stodgy bureaucrats of the European Commission need to get a brain transplant to keep up. I wouldn't bet on Microsoft going away any time soon, but they are no longer the threat they once appeared to be, just as that previous behemoth IBM was swamped by the competition in the 1980s and 1990s with no need for government intervention.

In researching this situation a bit, I came across an interesting proposal for unbundling future versions of IE from Windows for the sake of better security. This is a far more intelligent thing to do than the stupid, simple minded idea of adding extra icons to the desktop.

Just in case someone really wants to read TFA, here is a link to the more eye friendly version (printer version): http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Network+Security&articleId=9128280&taxonomyId=142

Ps. Just because there is a "Slashdot this article with maximum clutter" button, you don't have to inherently click on it.

The first thing to consider is is Google a monopoly?
Both the Computerworld article and Bloomberg's mention Google's online advertizing but neither says that both Microsoft and Yahoo! also has online advertizing. According to CNN Google's market share in online advertising is 75%, MS's is 5%, and Yahoo's is 20%.

Next they both talk about Google being in cloud computing, however they don't say Google faces competition there too, from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and other businesses.

The third to consider, actually it should be the first, is is being a monopoly illegal? And the answer is no. What is illegal is using a monopoly position to stifle competition in another business. And Google hasn't even been accused of that.

Falcon

the countires adopting Linux in the first place are rthose where people cannot afford the price of retail Microsoft software [...]

You don't read much news, do you?

Because most people WANT TO RUN THEIR APPS and not dick around with Linux. When will people realise that vast majority of the mass market actually wants windows and will continue to want Windows for the foreseeable future.

I agree with the first part but not the second. I don't think people want Windows, they want something they are used to or what they use at work. And though Windows still has the biggest, by far, marketshare it's it is falling. I also think people aren't aware there are apps for the other OSes that can do what they want their apps to do. For instance how many people know there's a version of Office for Macs? Macs come with a 30 day trialware of Office. About 17 months ago I switched from Windows to OS X and before I did I made a list of what I wanted to do then looked to see if there was Mac software that did it.

Falcon

I wouldn't say MP/RIAAs business model is dead but they do need to modify it.

The publisher is no longer required to publish the music, the creators of the music can simply do it themselves.

I think that some local bands around here do, publish their own stuff. Actually some release vinyl records.

The time period in history for charging for 'dead' music rather than live music is over

If I had a turntable, I hope to get one RSN, there are old albums I'd buy such as BTO, Beatles, ZZ Top and others.

So distributed music media is going the direction of the vinyl record.

Those vinyl records are making a comeback. "Back to the future: Vinyl record sales double in '08, CDs down". Best Buy is selling records in some stores.

Falcon

Lame blogs aside, The Fucking Article is damn near worthless. Highlights include:

• The study was done by BeyondTrust Corp. who is looking to push their Privilege Manager software, which shockingly is permissions-management software. Right off the bat we have a dubious study due to the conflict of interest and the sponsor.
• The article makes no distinction among what OSs were used in the study. Was it Vista? XP? Server 2003?
• The article also makes no distinction on if UAC was used, if Vista was used at all. Of course why would a company trying to sell security software want to tell people that just enabling UAC and/or setting your users as standard users would fix the problem?
• The only quote is from the director of marketing.

In conclusion: Running everything with admin privileges is bad, which is why Microsoft fixed this 2 years ago with UAC. It's a lame PR piece about an equally lame study from a company that wants to sell you stuff to do things that MS did years ago. If you are here reading Slashdot, there's nothing here you didn't already know.

So, who else is shocked that Team $10 laptop didn't actually have the magic bullet? No hands?

Pick me, Fatcat!

Couple of Zilog 380s or a cheap later model Motorolla 68k chips, Micro SD card support for storage, specialised TV-out SVGA so they can hook it up to their TV, a second-hand keyboard they can probably find for nix. Add one of the GPL microcomputer GUI OSes like BeOS or AmigaOS (or whatever GPL clones exist if licenses are too pricey) and you're laughing.

For a tenner, you're going to get a microcomputer with whatever modern era storage and RAM is cheap. That's more than enough for working online, education software, and business needs. It's certainly more than what sufficed for Western consumers in the 1980s and early 1990s.

If you're expecting a desktop or laptop with high spec modern components for cheap, you're not looking at the what the market can afford there. Nor are you looking at what its current competitors are already doing for $12 with much smaller volumes and no government subsidies.

Windows 7 is coming out and people will be migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Windows Market Share Climbing

Well, here, now you can't say you've never seen or heard of that:

There's a pretty serious trojan going on for Mac OS X right now that you contract by running a pirated copy of iWorks 2009.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126609

Why don't people mod this up more?

Perhaps because we actually RT 2nd page of the FA, which suggests obliging MS to ship Windows with other browsers installed and presented to the user in addition to IE?

Wait... I'm on Slashdot, aren't I? Sorry, silly response.

They aren't unique anyway.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=300161

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how abut a link here

So, you're suggesting Microsoft engaged in a campaign to advertise a variety of systems as "Vista Capable" to the one group most capable of recognizing that Microsoft was lying to them?

that'll be Microsoft windows product management Vice-Presidents then.

Is here http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9116758

Here is the print version.

It's a little bit frustrating to read because you can't tell the interviewers questions and the answers apart.

"this was also the fault of the hardware manufacturers who pushed so hard on Microsoft to get the sticker on their products"

Like where, according to Microsoft insider Rob Enderle the push came from MS over the protests of Intel and others, unless you know differently.

'sitting on the OEM typically is not effective at making a problem like this go away'

That's revenue, not profit.

Looks like the "Vista Capable" scam is about to set them back a few months too...

Microsoft Corp. would have to come up with as much as $8.5 billion to settle accounts with the customers affected by its 2006 "Vista Capable" marketing program, according to documents unsealed by a federal court.

It's even worse than that. Intel is going to shut four plants and lay off 6,000 workers.

I'm no business analyst, but obviously Linux (the netbook market in particular) is severely cutting into the profits of computer giants like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and IBM. If you needed a sign for the year of Linux, this is it!

I have 4 q6600 quad computers. One is running vista, one is running xp and two of them are running ubuntu. I do volunteer work for world community grid. The number of results for the last 14 days are as follows: vista 184, xp 127, ubuntu1 150, ubuntu2 210. They all have different motherboards but have the same amount of ram memory. The Ubuntu computers are running 64 bit version while the vista and xp are 32 bit operating systems. Here is an article http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126460&source=rss_topic12 that states that going to 8 processors does not increase efficiency by much because of the memory access problem. The processors will spend too much time waiting for their turn to access ram memory.

"it almost sounds like they're saying that if you want to save billions of dollars you have to do .. some .. (no!) ... work!?!?"

But too many people think that switching to Linux, Apache, etc, simply means that you don't have to pay for software anymore. And then they're shocked at the expenses that are racked up on things like re-training, support contracts (have you seen what Red Hat charges?) custom software cost due to migration, etc.

I'm a fan of open source software, but I'm under no illusion that it's always the right solution. High end Unix systems like Solaris still have better administration tools and built in virtualization, which is one reason why Linux doesn't completely own the 'nix market. When Qualcomm was looking at a mass-switch to open source (and ditching their Solaris-based infrastructure), they were unhappy about the state of management tools, and estimated that switching to open source would cost them more money, not less.

Bottom line: analyze, determine your needs, and use the best solution for the job, whatever it is.

In fact, as those articles will show you -- they've done so much more that they are now recognized as one of the leaders in developing secure software. I think you're basing your opinions on slightly old data. Your views are valid for MS products released 3/4 years ago or older.

Vista needed beefier hardware because it wasn't tuned to run on a 1GB machine with integrated Intel graphics.

We could go with that. W7 beta definitely runs OK on a 1GB machine with integrated Intel graphics.

It doesn't cover the slow file copy problem, though. Or the multimedia interfering with networking problem. Or the problem with the backdoor that listens over the Internet by default for authentication attempts despite the fact that best practice has for 10 years to by default not do that.

But yeah, not running on bog standard hardware - that's a nit some people would pick.

Will our freedoms and rights be next in line? Will the United States be forced to adopt European restrictions on free speech? Will Europe be forced to adopt Islamic restrictions on free speech? Will the United States, Finland, Switzerland and Norway be forced to adopt stricter gun control laws?

You can allow free movement for people and still keep your rights and laws. Allowing free pass at borders for anyone doesn't take any freedom from you.

Anyone can make claims like this. I claim the Palm will be the best phone, because it's designed well, it just works, and although it doesn't do anything new, it does them in a way that's better.

Well, that's quite clever since you can't actually buy the Palm yet and all people are going on is a video demonstration and, if you're lucky, a few minutes "hands on" at CES. Whereas the iPhone has been available for some time, and has been the subject of in-depth comparative reviews which frequently come to conclusions such as:

While the iPhone is not the most feature-rich device, this group of experts found that when it comes to usability, iPhone does, indeed, live up to its hype.

Link

I'm not judging the Palm just yet - it looks promising - but since the launch of the iPhone there have been lots of phones with impressive feature lists and iPhone-inspired aesthetics which - as with the HTC in the review above - fail to cut the mustard when it comes to actual usability.

Good design most certainly can be described in objective terms.

Yes, and terms like logical and consistent layouts, responsiveness and avoiding feature creep are objective, as is "for fsck's sake don't try to cram in every last feature that some man and his dog has asked for". You'll see these coming up in in-depth reviews of Apple stuff. Its just that such decisions and principles - especially the reasons why things have been left out - may not be immediately obvious to an end user.

From As an article at :

"We're not emulating [applications from] the old Palm OS, but will allow third-party emulation," said Pam Deziel, vice president of product management

At least it's a better and more open stance than Apple, but it's still tossing a lot of good code out the window.

As for porting existing PalmOS apps to WebOS, many apps can surely be ported but it's not just a matter of code -- the new OS also using a brand new UI paradigm which it will be difficult, or at least non-trivial, to adjust a good number of apps to.

Second, there's the making-available perspective: traditionally, you could get your Palm software from just about everywhere, but now Palm is talking about a software portal in the style of Apple's AppStore (which is so proprietary I can't even browse it as a visitor because I don't have iTunes installed). I wonder what this means for indie developers' possibilities to host their own software outlets?

I think I shall after all stick to my plan to buy a refurbished Treo 680 (as a replacement for a T3 and a crummy Nokia). In all likelihood it will be at least 1 1/2 years until the Pre hits the European markets anyway.

Well, I'm vaguely interested, though it's unlikely I'll ever use it myself, I can be pretty sure I'll have to troubleshoot it for friends and relatives.

What's more interesting to me, is that here we are on Slashdot, discussing what's essentially a point release to a failed Microsoft operating system, while in the mean time, other supposedly less-geeky sites like Reddit are discussing the release of Linux kernel 2.6.28.

I guess that shows just how much Slashdot has been taken over by Microsoft evangelists. Might be a good time to establish a News for Nerds who like Choices site...

Drivers for Windows 7 and Vista are one and the same, as indicated here:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9091618
Microsoft Corp. will require hardware makers to test their device drivers on Windows 7 to receive certification for Windows Vista, according to documents posted on the company's Web site.

You say "destroy national sovereignty" (and all of the restrictions therein) like it's a bad thing.

You see restrictions where I see freedoms. Globalization has already created a race to the bottom for labor and environmental standards. Will our freedoms and rights be next in line? Will the United States be forced to adopt European restrictions on free speech? Will Europe be forced to adopt Islamic restrictions on free speech? Will the United States, Finland, Switzerland and Norway be forced to adopt stricter gun control laws?

What really bothers me about governments and large organizations in general is that they fail to understand the saying, "no matter how far down the wrong path you have travelled, turn back." Governments almost never say "this sounded like a good idea at the time but it's just not working, things are getting worse, time to abandon this idea and try something else." If they do say that, it's over the course of decades or sometimes centuries even though the knowledge of better solutions (or at least that this solution isn't working) has been around for a long time.

I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised. If there were a way to get rid of otherwise legally valid laws that can be objectively proven to be counterproductive, not because enough voters put enough pressure on the legislators to repeal the law, but because at least one citizen can rigorously prove that it has failed, this would represent real progress.

You say "destroy national sovereignty" (and all of the restrictions therein) like it's a bad thing.

You see restrictions where I see freedoms. Globalization has already created a race to the bottom for labor and environmental standards. Will our freedoms and rights be next in line? Will the United States be forced to adopt European restrictions on free speech? Will Europe be forced to adopt Islamic restrictions on free speech? Will the United States, Finland, Switzerland and Norway be forced to adopt stricter gun control laws?

If your benchmark is XP, then yes, it's better (maybe --because people are conditioned to click "yes" anyway), but there are better benchmarks out there.

Why shouldn't XP be the benchmark? Windows still holds almost 90% of the market and the majority of Vista users upgaded from XP (myself included). For most of them I imagine XP is all they've ever known. As far as they're concerned, what other benchmark is there?

You're SOL on the 'make it easy on me' bit.

From the article's 'How to get it' FAQ link:"The Windows 7 beta is actually an upgrade, not a full new install. You need to have a machine running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to install the beta.
So if you're still running Windows XP -- which a lot of people are, what with Vista's problems, real or imagined -- you're up a creek sans the proverbial paddle."

It will also be in an .iso format only for the download(from the same FAQ), so I guess you could hack the files in the image to enable it to be mounted in a vm. I do not have the skills to do so...maybe it's easy, maybe difficult and not worth the effort...I don't know.

'To protect your MP3 files' - uhm, wtf?!

According to Computer World:

"When MP3 files are added (either manually or automatically) to either the Windows Media Player or the Windows Media Center library, or if the file metadata is edited with Windows Explorer, several seconds of audio data may be permanently removed from the start of the file. This issue occurs when files contain thumbnails or other metadata of significant size before importing or editing them."

That may be so, but I'd take the review here with a grain of salt.

Preston Gralla is pretty much the epitome of a breathless Windows fanboi. Try reading some of his articles about Vista...

To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista.

Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch

The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system.

Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X

...and his blog here is full of pro MS/anti [any competitor] drivel.

That may be so, but I'd take the review here with a grain of salt.

Preston Gralla is pretty much the epitome of a breathless Windows fanboi. Try reading some of his articles about Vista...

To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista.

Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch

The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system.

Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X

...and his blog here is full of pro MS/anti [any competitor] drivel.

According to ComputerWorld.com this will be a DVD iso and require Vista SP1 to install. So it's an upgrade, not a full install. In my skimming, no mention of Live CD.

Yesterday (and before) the rumor was that it would be a ZPower silver-zinc battery which would last 5 years or so. But this is the same old Lithium Polymer technology, which starts degrading right away and will need to be replaced in 3 years (or much less if you charge it too often). It's a bummer to know right up-front that you are going to have this pain in the butt to look forward to so soon. Long life between charges is not enough: it needs to have a long total lifetime before they should be making it non-removeable. The computer will definitely not be obsolete by the time the battery wears out, so you will have to replace it at least once. And the "recycling" for LiPoly is pathetic (they just recover the cobalt and burn all the lithium, which is quite a waste of such a rare metal).

And still no tablet! (iPhone doesn't count, I mean a real tablet Mac) And no upgraded Mini!

If you want someone to blame, blame Bernhard Mueller who knew about and told MSFT about the bug in April and waited until NOW to disclose it to the world. He says in the article that MSFT started blowing him off in September, yet he waits until NOW to disclose? The least the ass could have done is waited until after Xmas IMHO. If the damn thing has been sitting there since April without a major attack it could have waited a few more weeks. Or if he really had a giant bug up his butt to disclose he could have done it in the first weeks of November after being blown off by MSFT for a month. Releasing the details NOW just seems kinda shitty to me.

In the long run I think what he did was for the best. Microsoft has talked a good game lately about security and how much they value it, so you'd think they would appreciate information like this and would quickly use it. I mean, think about it. Lots of people who discover vulnerabilities immediately go public with them. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it has to be one hell of an inconvenience to the vendor. Here you have someone who was willing to work with the vendor and gave them far more than enough time to use his information and handle this in a much smoother way and they blew him off.

It's a shame that predictable situations that could have been easily handled often have to become big problems before anyone decides to address them, but this is often the case. The worse this one is and the more problems it causes, the more pressure there is on Microsoft to stop ignoring people who want to work with them on security issues. I am no fan of Microsoft and I personally don't like Windows, but there is a bigger picture here. No matter how I feel about them, many millions of people use Microsoft products or depend on servers that run Microsoft software and they stand to experience preventable problems when known security issues are not fixed. The Internet is a shared resource; the more secure these users are, the better the network is for everyone. There's really no excuse for how Microsoft handled this one. I don't personally use their products, but if I did, this would make me reconsider.

If you want someone to blame, blame Bernhard Mueller who knew about and told MSFT about the bug in April and waited until NOW to disclose it to the world. He says in the article that MSFT started blowing him off in September, yet he waits until NOW to disclose? The least the ass could have done is waited until after Xmas IMHO. If the damn thing has been sitting there since April without a major attack it could have waited a few more weeks. Or if he really had a giant bug up his butt to disclose he could have done it in the first weeks of November after being blown off by MSFT for a month. Releasing the details NOW just seems kinda shitty to me.

When Microsoft has not come up with a fix for a problem they have been working on since April 2008, why expect a patch soon?

Link

* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?

Simply because sometimes, on Vista, an administrator is not enough of an administrator to perform some tasks.

See, told you it was simple answer. F**ked up problem, but a simple answer.

When Reverend Huckabee runs for president again in 2012, just remember then that you can't see how much of his Wikipedia entry was cooked by his staffers still buried in the Arkansas government he controlled up until he ran for 2008.

Consider how Reverend Huckabee destroyed evidence on many state computers to cover probable crimes (hard to prove when he's destroyed the evidence) when he left office in Arkansas to start campaigning for president.

Reverend Huckabee stands for faith based government. Why shouldn't he rely on a "mysterious hand" to improve his image?

And keep in mind just how much power he'd have with a covert government built on the foundation installed by Bush/Cheney.

Reminds me of another time microsoft made sure the English saved a lot of money. The links:

Really?!

Oh.

Google wrote chrome from scratch* in less time than IE7 was in beta (or if not, it wasn't too far off) and came up with a browser that blows away IE in every single way except the number of desktops that have it installed.

and password manager security

Yes, IE 5 is also affected according to this article. In addition, IE6 and IE7 as well as IE8 Beta 2 are also affected.

In all seriousness, I thought the "Linux on the desktop" model was dead several years ago. I can see how Enderle's point applies to Apple, but it seems an enormous stretch to predict that consumers will generally examine the desktop market as it exists today and opt for Linux over Vista, XP, or OS X. I realize Linux has gained ground in the netbook market and done well when debuted on systems that used customized distros. What's the larger picture?

In all seriousness, Linux on the desktop spanks any version of Windows silly.

The new version of the KDE desktop, KDE 4.1.3 or later, has worked out its initial teething troubles and now represent the only GPU-accelerated desktop for Linux, and as such is easily the fastest desktop available today, bar none. Because they use software rendering, not even "lightweight" Linux desktops such as LXDE or Fluxbox are as fast. KDE4 runs all of the compiz-style bling (including the desktop cube and 4 desktops), it is scriptable, it runs KDE3 or GTK applications easily and pretty well integrated, and it has innovative new desktop facets such as strigi, nepomuk et al, and it can run Google widgets, OSX widgets or Plasmoids at the same time (KDE 4.2+).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081202-hands-on-kde-4-2-beta-1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_4#KDE_4.2

If you desperately need to run the odd legacy Windows application, you can very likely run it under Wine with more compatibility than Vista offers, and faster than Vista can. If it fails to run under Wine, then you can still run a version of Windows virtually using your choice of two free and open-source Virtual Machine Managers:

VirtualBox OSE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualbox

Kernel-based Virtual Machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine
http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-kvm-on-ubuntu-8.10

Wine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)#64-bit_applications

Significantly, just this last year or so some larger OEMs have begun to offer desktop Linux pre-installed:

http://linux.dell.com/desktops.shtml
http://blogs.computerworld.com/with_hp_in_all_oems_now_ship_desktop_linux
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/desktop/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212400561&subSection=News
http://www.workswithu.com/2008/12/12/system76-launches-biometric-ubuntu-linux-laptops/

Finally, desktop Linux has (according to some measurements anyway) finally started to gain a measurable adoption rate, just 1.5% behind that of Mac OSX:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Vendors such as Canonical are actually finally putting some effort into promoting Linux as a usable, practical desktop OS:
http://www.workswithu.com/

No-one told Linux that it was "dead on the desktop". Linux is dominant in every other area of computing, from supercomputers to clusters to servers to infrastructure machines (such as routers) to embedded devices in general (such as cellphones),

Acid-free paper (used in all quality book, e.g., Springer Verlag) is a very durable medium.

In fact, Gartner research recommends paper if storage is supposed to last over 10 years.

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,64684,00.html

Of course, digital content management peddlers will disagree.

Check out the following story: a University of Southern California neurobiologist wanted to read the records of the Viking mission but couldn't read the data on the magnetic tapes. He had to find the paper records and pay people to type everything that was in them:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-01-17-digital_x.htm

Photos are also stable if they weren't made with the new inkjet printers (all those fast photo services), but the old-fashioned way. They last for many decades, as we know from family photos and museums.

Several problems with the article. No mention of metric, as parent said. No mention of what Linux-based OS they used. Choice quotes like the following, "but Linux is 'always faster' than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, 'it never runs anything in the background.'" What do background applications have to do with anything? And both Windows 2000 and all Linux distros run stuff in the background. Even DOS does that.

To top it off, the article is spread out over 3 pages. Here's the print link: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Storage&articleId=9123140&taxonomyId=19

"Windows XP SP3, Vista, and Windows Server 2008 aren't vulnerable", Shados That's two out of four not affected ..

'Impact: Execution of arbitrary code via network, User access via network'

"I didn't read how the exploit actually works to see if it can realistically be used to attack Windows Server 2003", Shados

'"limited and targeted" attacks are in progress by hackers exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter .. If exploited, a hacker could gain the same rights on a PC as a local user and could remotely execute code'

http://www.cio.com/article/470080/Another_Microsoft_Bug_Revealed_on_Huge_Patch_Day http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9123100