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FOSS has made it possible to create these machines and circumvent Microsoft's near monopoly...

I'm not sure FOSS made their existence possible, but it certainly made this price differential possible:

Computerworld

The mini-notebook phenom has most definitely highlighted the Windows tax on computer hardware. And it's nice to see examples of having that price differential clearly illustrated. And that's the way it should be. If you feel having Windows adds $100 of value to your notebook, by all means go right ahead and fork over the $$$.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9093718

Yes, that's right. IPhone will be sold unlocked here at Brazil.

Unlocked French iPhones on sale for $1,106

The printable version

"Otherwise, get a Mac."

No thanks.

"The company has forecast Eee PC shipments at around 5 million units this year. Based on the 6-to-4 ratio the company predicts, Asus could ship around 3 million Windows Eee PCs and 2 million Linux ones."

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9068258

"a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States"

No, what really happened was the grid was overloaded and the SQL virus was playing havoc with connectivity, then a tree fell over and tripped out a line, which spread in a domino effect all the way to Canada. A similar virus tripped out the control system in a Nuclear power plant.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080531_6948.php

"During the hour before the Aug. 14 blackout, engineers in the control center of an Ohio utility struggled to figure out why transmission lines were failing and complained that a computer failure was making it difficult to determine what was going on, transcripts of telephone communications released Wednesday show"

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/09/60285

"Software failure cited in August blackout investigation .. A malfunctioning alarm system may have played a big role in the outage Dan Verton Nov 20 2003"

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/2003/in200314.pdf

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/recovery/story/0,10801,87400,00.html

It seems to be common now for companies' to strip users of all their privileges ASAP. If you think this was bad, be glad you're not be laid-off. I've often many people tell me that they learned they no longer had a job when their sessions were terminated in the middle of the work day.

Welcome to the work-world of the 21st century.

Steven
http://www.practical-tech.com/
http://blogs.computerworld.com/sjvn

I'm not sure what you mean by "too little too late", considering Microsoft has been selling Office 2007 like pancakes since it was released.

Do you not understand how botnets work? If you start spewing spam from some huge Unix box sitting on a fiber backbone, you'll get blacklisted in 15 minutes and discovered no more than an hour later. This technique is still in use, but deprecated.

Consider the DoS attack. You have a few big servers spewing out packets as fast as you can at some target and what happens? The target notes the IP addresses of the few sources and blocks them, then contacts their owners to get them fixed. Your DoS attack lasts at most an hour.

Now consider the DDoS attack. You have a million PCs all sending out a few packets per second at a target. How does that target manually block a million PCs? How do they even detect which PCs are part of the attack and which ones are legit? There's certainly no way to contact the owners of the millions of PCs to get them fixed. In this case, your attack could last for days.

It should now be obvious why the types of attacks you suggest went out of style years ago in favor of the botnet.

dom

Thinking that using Unix is the solution to getting 0wned is like thinking that heterosexuality is the solution to getting AIDS. The only general solution is education.

As the article states, this malware is all based on social engineering. If you can convince somebody to run a program because it will show them the latest celebrity sex tape, it doesn't matter what OS they're running. Right now it only works on Windows because the malware authors know that they can get 90% of the market by doing only 10% of the work and it's very difficult for virus-type malware to spread when hosts that are susceptible are hard to find. If any other OS took over perhaps 25% of the market, that OS would become a target also.

The answer, of course, is to educate users that they should be very skeptical of offers to view some celebrity sex tape or dancing bunnies, and that they should ignore such things.

The fact that Unix doesn't have many naive desktop users simply means that it gets attacked in different ways than typical Windows machines. Quite frankly, the first worm ever took advantage of the insecurity of Unix machines, and the term rootkit obviously comes from the Unix world.

dom

Don't bother clicking through for the videos. All three only show how they dropped the laptops on the floor. Whooping three shots per laptop: falling on the floor on the spine, base from 29 inches and in a bag from 60 inches. Nothing interesting. Just go with the print version if you want to read it.

This has been known for many years. Here are more taken from my personal ant Web site:

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT! (Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook.

Ants In
My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox. Thanks nTrFace.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive: Ontrack
and Computerworld
(seen on /.).

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.

Here's the link to the article on one continuous page, bypassing the ads and pageload glomming.

To save you having to wade through 6 ad-filled half pages - here's the link.

Why this link is't published to start with is beyond me.

I have to agree to parent here. Common hardware, i.e. the same data card, should have been used. In an attempt to make a car analogy...

Three cars take three different roads to arrive at the same destination. Speeds vary while driving, sometimes going the speed limit (average download), other times pushing their individual car to the limit where there are no restrictions on speed. Once the cars arrive, the finger is pointed solely at the roads they traveled over, not taking into account the car.

Oh, and printer-friendly link to skip clicking through five pages of ads: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9083559

Looks like EDS is still milking that cow: http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0,10801,108308,00.html

Sure, the DRM infestation on Vista doesn't break things if you personally have no DRM "equipped" media- no itunes, no netflicks, etc. But you still get the overhead and consequent slowdown.

The change in sound API (Application Programming Interface) and the underlying sound models means that the older sound cards won't work without updated drivers. Creative sound card owners get screwed as the sound hardware (DSP) on the card that they already paid for isn't utilized, because the DRM on Vista can't trust it.

Sorry, I should have been more clear- Vista is useless on older hardware that only supports 512 MB of ram. You know, those 3 & 4 year old systems most people are using. Yes, I've used vista on low end Dell with just 512 of ram, and it took minutes just to open menus. Completely unuseable. On a brand new dual core with 512MB, it might be acceptable, I dunno.

Most experienced Windows users and 95% of businesses (that being a large portion of MS installs) wouldn't touch a new MS OS until SP1. As SP1 only has been out a month, that implies that it's had about 1 month of testing by the people who need it work, and aren't just playing games with it. I get paid to work with bleeding edge HPC systems- I just want my home PC to run well.

If you already have 85-90% of the market with your current OS, I wouldn't be crowing about your new OS getting to just 10% of the market, given that it's been released to the general public for over 15 months. Here's what businesses (the largest part of MS sales remember) are doing:

In the past, when MS released SP1 & SP2 for XP, they weren't competing with themselves.

I suggest to you that no service packs were released during the last 3 years so as to not interfere (i.e. make XP more desirable and easy to use) with the release of Vista. Just poor execution that Vista's release was delayed for so long.

I'm not claiming that the specific group of packages, updates, & changes known as SP3 could have been released 3 years ago- I'm claiming that an appropriate group of packages, updates, & changes for the timeframe could have been released 3 years ago, and should have been. MS simply choose not to do so.

Feel free to document (well, to that extent that I've documented) this lack of pain for the users of XP.

According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."

Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.

The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said.

Yes, it sure is a far cry from their previous position on the price difference:

...

Me too, but I really wish they would put out some more info on pricing and launch date. I'm not gonna wait around forever; I may just say fsck it and get the eee 900 anyway if I don't hear more from them soon...

Here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9083718

One page print page.

Transmission loss over long distances is only a problem with AC. Transmitting electricity as DC at high voltages reduces the loss. Here's a page on using DC in Data centers: Edison's Revenge: Will DC power rise again?.

This was done with MSRT via patch tuesday. Some details here:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9080958

The linked salary guide in the blurb goes to a subscription.
There is a small salary guide in the article, I think that should have been linked to instead.

There is a salary guide in the article.

It's not here yet, but it is coming.

A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/

From http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020942&pageNumber=1 "ColdFusion. This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages. Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. "It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products," he says" So, it is counterintuitive with these new stats! Who should one believe?

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Your post reminded me of this. Unfortunately it seems that there is no system that doesn't require janitors. Or maybe it seems to not require janitors, but really it's so obscure that it requires trained mechanics to keep it running instead of just janitors to clean up after the occassional spill.

dom

"these computer systems were not designed with the internet in mind. SCADA systems that control physical systems over a wide geographic area were built before the internet even existed"

I assume you mean by 'these computers' Microsoft Windows, and Windows was most certanly designed for the Internet and security at the very least from Windows NT. Connecting these 'computers' through the Internt was an economic measure, designed to save on maintaining a private network. What's mind boggling is that they are still connecting such 'computers' to the Internet in 2008. Have these 'computer' professionals learned nothing since the Blackout of 2003. See also SQL virus takes down Nuclear Power Plant SPDS system.

Given how cheap computers are why are these machines on the internet at all. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It took 5 years after http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,84510,00.html for this one company to look into their security? How screwed are the others? At what point does this become criminal negligence?

Did the following hacks also invoke the OSX popup 2008 2007

XP's not going anywhere anytime soon. MS can stop selling it, but they've already committed to supporting it through 2014, and with Vista the way it is many people and enterprises are exercising their downgrade rights, or keeping their old XP PCs.

And it's possible that MS would ship Windows 7 in 2009, but despite Mr. Gates' speech the official line is still that Windows 7 is shipping in 2010.

Computerworld botnet C&C article

maybe because they don't have a majority of the market, even this computerworld article critical of the move and claiming monopolistic tactics says they have 15% of the market

You have to follow a few links in the first link to get to this fine article where they explain that in 2007, XP's share went up in the enterprise. Since we know the end is nigh for Vista as well there seems little motivation to feel this pain.

That's telling, isn't it? And that's actually from Forrester, whose bias is legendary in favor of Redmond.

I should think some Vista evangelists aren't getting their bonuses this year.

You have this FBI Posts Fake Hyperlinks To Trap Downloaders of Illegal Porn

And this Feds lie about link between software piracy and terrorism

And this Wikileaks shut down

And this Anonymous

And this Net Neutrality Blasted by MPAA Bosses

And this (note, this may be conspiracy theory BS, but I'm posting it anyway) Pentagon: The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system".

It's going to take someone writing an essay to try to connect all the dots as to what may or may not be going on behind the scenes, but it seems obvious that a lot of people don't like the internet, or perhaps the internet is just too free and a lot of people want to stop the internet revolution and cable TV the net. I'm sure it has something to do with net-neutrality.

Slashdot posted this well-accepted article a while back http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9050878/ and it described the 5 users with whom an admin hates to deal.

1. The Know-It-All
2. The Know-Nothing
3. Mr. Entitlement
4. The Finger-Pointer
5. The Twentysomething Whiz Kid

Given that there are more of these than there are "Dream Users", a "Web 2.0" approach may not be the best idea.

However, speaking from the lips of one of the "Dream Users", I'd like to have a bit more freedom on *my* workstation. As it is right now, I cannot write to the program files directory nor install any program that requires registry entries. That means no compatability updates, no utilities (Acrobat Reader), etc. I can't streamline boot up, reduce RAM usage-- any of the things I would do on my own with an out-of-the-box machine without any fear of technological repercussions.

So, no, don't give everyone self-governance abilities, but please utilize the bomb-ass users you have. Help them help themselves!

• The ISO members (the JTC1 committee) found 3522 defects in the OOXML standard
• The Ecma grouped these complaints and proposed 1027 changes on about 2300 pages
• Microsoft said they had adressed 662 of the proposals
• At the isos ballot resolution meeting (BRM) 900 of the 1027 proposals were not checked (they didn't check if MS had implemented the changes)
• Rob Weir used a random sampling technique to estimate how many proposals were actually implemented: about 1.5%

...because the crack was already done a few months ago - I think the referred article only just picked it up

Although the eetimes article in the link says the encryption was broken easily, the way they developed the attack does not seem to be easy in any sense of the word. They analyzed the chip using high powered microscopes and slicing off layers to analyze the gates involved in the encryption. If that's considered "easy", then I'd sure like to see what eetimes considers "hard".

"August 30, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9033701

Now tell me that's not corruption.

hmm...seems big and another device to lug around...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9003358

Are you kidding me? You, the kind of person interested enough in and knowledgeable enough about computers to be a Slashdot reader and poster, installed TWO anti-malware packages (btw, what does Symantec AV corporate cost per year?) on a computer and you somehow think that's TYPICAL?!? That's my whole point! I'd love to see the same girl with NO HELP and an OUT-OF-THE-BOX OEM Windows laptop, and compare her experience to that of her twin sister with a stock MacBook. We'll see which one calls more in the first two years. My whole point was the difference you see in STOCK systems piloted by TYPICAL users.

Consider this: if the Windows laptop were hacked into first, would we even be reading about this? IT IS NEWS BECAUSE IT IS RARE, which again, is my whole point. Nowhere in my posts did I say "Macs are perfect and invincible." Besides, people probably focused on the Mac because breaking it would gain more notoriety--this wasn't exactly a scientific experiment. Miller was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems (Why was he first?) on the second day. Had another attacker been given the opportunity, they might have chose Linux or Windows.

This is not science. This is not the end of the world. This is, in the purest sense of the word, an anomaly.

Sometimes I forget that OSX is built on a Unix core. Next time design machines are due for an upgrade I'll mention that.