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Um, huh? I can walk into my living room or my neighbor's house and verify that these two Windows PCs are toast. Anyone else who comes to Orlando is free to do the same. Sorry no bloggers are camped out in my yard at the moment. You're going on about anecdotes versus data and you're backing this up with... a report from a conference saying that ONE hack has been done. Please go buy a dictionary and/or visit a high-school science or math teacher and get back to me. Also note that this was done by an experienced exploit-finder and he's already signed an NDA--this probably won't be on the script-kiddie networks tomorrow.

From another FA: "Is it critical? Yes. Should you be concerned? Probably not - unless you visit malicious websites often or open emails from people you don't trust. Will there be a huge outbreak of attacks based on this vulnerability? If history is any indicator, no" [emphasis mine]

Yup here's another example of "Mocrosloth doesn't even say they have a problem: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9071660&source=rss_news50

Looking at the pics what caught my eye was this one. 7 years in the future and people are STILL demanding XP instead of Vista!

Check out the bottom right hand picture on this page:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9070218&pageNumber=3

Note the distinct boobie shaped "keyboard."

NOW say tactile is out.

This innovation interests me most, aside from the obvious uses, but taking a step further. It would be an incredible educational tool as well as for the average consumer. Here's the shots they had for this with the article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9070218&pageNumber=3 This is probably way down the line, but a true simulation of open heart surgery? Driving tests/lessons without having to take students into the streets? How about 3D maps to help us find our way around? To be honest, I am afraid of the next generation of internet "pop ups".

The Siafu concept notebook with it's tactile surface looks like a very nice idea.

It really makes me wonder how it would display, say, Pamela Anderson...

nice, vista is apparently being used on the Compenion concept notebook here

What are you talking about? The only one which doesn't have the toolbar hidden is running Windows Vista. Now whats really interesting is that you can clearly see a anime derived wallpaper behind the clutter. PS: I'm talking about this photo: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9070218/

Also, according to the image on page 4, in 2015, we STILL won't be using Vista.

"At least I can generate cryptographically secure pseudorandom numbers.. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/1528211" - by Brian Gordon (987471) on Monday March 24, @10:00PM (#22852434) Homepage So can I (Windows Server 2003 SP #2 fully hotfix patched user here IS why):

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9048438

"Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and the not-yet-released Windows Server 2008, however, apparently use a modified or different random number generator; Microsoft said they were immune to the attack strategy." :)

(Hmmmm, that seems to show that VISTA is immune to PRNG weaknesses also!)

APK

P.S.=> Sorry Slashdotters: NO "Anti-Microsoft/Anti-Windows" F.U.D. allowed... had to point this much out, so you don't go & misinform others (like usual here)... apk

When I look at my city I see Huge areas where it would be next to usless. Now city wide fiber I can see but wifi? Seems like a solution waiting for a problem.

Actually having public WiFi helped tremendously here in Minneapolis last year, when the I35W bridge collapsed. WiFi boosted the radio communications.

Yep, maybe Mozilla should make it clearer to the user that they're collecting data on installation instances of their browser.

But then Apple should perhaps make it clearer that by installing Safari, the user is more likely to be the victim of a phishing attack.

The link didn't work for me, so here's another: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9069038

Evidently not.

160GB anyone?

Corsair's Flash Padlock has the same issue. You can open the case through a single screw in the back of the drive and then access an electronic switch on the board, which can be easily tripped with a piece of wire, giving you access to the memory chip without having to punch in a security PIN. Hardware security methods just aren't as secure as software-based encryption.

At the show in December, another article said:

"In a short demonstration of an Intel solid-state drive at work in a laptop, Saleski showed that the drive could read and write 680MB of data and related storage in 24 seconds. The read and write speed of the solid state drive will be three to four times faster than that of most hard drives, and it will initially cost as much as three times as much as a hard drive, he said."

If in a year they are twice the price of a regular hard drive, that is a bargain for some of us, if for no other reason that to use it as a swap drive for the OS and scratch drive for Photoshop. It would also making loading game levels much faster, so an 80gb version could make an affordable addition to a regular drive that has the OS.

I thought it was me providing you information to help you figure out your problem. If it's occurring only on your machine, that sounds like it's the number (2) situation I describe. If you still think it's the number (1) situation, it's still up to you to write a useful bug report. You can read what folks are saying about Firefox 3, and I don't see any hint of it having any memory problem. In fact, they seem to be saying there isn't one.

I also read yesterday that US was advised to vote "yes" by INCITS, despite of what the US delegates and the HoD Frank Farance told about the BRM on the media.

Because the countries raised issues in alphabetic order, and the second round wasn't even completed, US delegates could raise only one issue for discussion. And yet, they recommend that the text is good enough for approval. Unbelievable. As you said, it really smells. Bad.

you must work for lenovo (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9034318)

I love how I have to read other country's news reports to find out what's going on in my own country...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9062527

For the love of /root, use the print link.

We dont want to see a little bit of content over 9 pages!

Blu-ray is still just too expensive add. Combine that with the fact that most folks don't really care whether they have it or not and you're simply not going to see it adopted.

Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?

In a few years they will probably wind up on ebay 8-)

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9060281

Actually, HIPAA does not cover third party databases.

I guess you haven't seen PDF exploit.

I know this may be hard for you to understand, but there is no such thing as "safe data". Even straight ASCII text can be malicious if the parser has a bug in it. If your browser has a bug that causes it to crash when parsing some HTML, there's a possible exploit from an HTML page with no media or special programming features whatsoever.

dom

I don't get the rest of TFA. Its all about how you shouldn't loose emails. But the example they have chosen is good reason why you should loose emails.

The best solution is to dump hotmail and move to a better free email client like Gmail or Yahoo

Well, a quick search found this for Office 2007 concerning its initial sales success:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011237
http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197006187

Speaking anecdotally, I can say that I've seen it widely deployed. Not the case for Vista though.

How much more will it take before governments start to view Microsoft as a non-responsible contractor and stop entering into contracts with them?

This convicted monopolist Microsoft was found by the judge in this most recent order to PURPOSELY have been foot dragging in terms of compliance with the judge's orders:

"It is clear, at least to the court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay... practically speaking, Microsoft has never complied with III.E..."

See: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=13&articleId=9060099&intsrc=hm_topic

Governments have rules that say that they are statutorily prohibited from entering into contracts with companies that lack business ethics. See for example http://www.ogs.state.ny.us/purchase/snt/overviews/SPF2005S08OscVendorResponsibility.rtf

How the hell can governments continue to justify contracting with a company like this that repeatedly has been found to have been flouting the law? I just don't get it.

Hey! Adding features and improving performance are non trivial tasks, mind you!

The judge will just order you to provide the police with the pass phrase. Refuse and you'll be jailed for contempt of court until to hand it over.

And this is not any different than the people that purchased new Macs and had to have 10.4 installed because of the application compatibility problems with Leopard. (Which ironically has more compatibilty and application problems than Vista, and yet only supports 1/1000th the software or hardware.) (Geesh Again)

...now what about this one? And this one?

You see, some of us look beyond one article. Some of use can see larger trends by doing so. And in this particular case, some of us are fully aware that telecommuters factor into the equation.

It's kinda cool how this "thinking" stuff works... you should try it sometime. ;)

It's not the "what I want to see" that I deal in, it's the "what I'll very likely end up seeing" that needs paying attention to.

(we now return you to your regularly scheduled attempts at "fanboi" bashing)

/P

Here are a few Firefox flaws. The list was made quickly; it is not extensive. Hundreds of articles have been written about Firefox problems; the articles mentioned here are just some I found during a quick search. The overall impression I get is that Firefox development is very badly managed.

CPU hogging: I've typed every comment in this thread under the same conditions: Firefox is taking 30-40% of the CPU. This has been reported many, many times, by many, many people. Leaving Firefox open for days, as when doing extended research, especially when the computer has been put into hibernation, causes Firefox to hog the CPU. Firefox actually corrupts Windows XP so that it is necessary to reboot the computer, not just Firefox.

The CPU hogging bug affects the most heavy users of Firefox.

Here is one of the many stories about Firefox CPU hogging, the February 08, 2007 PCWorld staff blog: Help! Firefox is Sucking the Life From My Processor!. Quote: "... Windows Task Manager shows that Firefox is bogarting 90 percent or more of my processing power. The problem happens pretty consistently on three different Windows machines I use."

Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs: Apparently developers have refused to start numerous windows and tabs so that they could see the CPU bug for themselves. That's been the response to the CPU hogging bug reports I've seen.

Firefox developers seem to be involved in work avoidance schemes. They don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.

Firefox cannot be made portable. Bad choices have been made in how Firefox handles its files. Running a portable version of Firefox is impossible if a version started from a hard drive is running.

Firefox will not allow multiple instances. If something goes wrong with one Firefox window and tabs, it affects all the windows and tabs that are running.

Firefox session restore is not reliable. If there happen to be delays in restoring a tab, possibly because other tabs were loading, Firefox throws away the URL, rather than simply displaying it in the tab with a blank window.

Firefox hogs memory. See the ComputerWorld article, Hands on: A look at Firefox's memory issues. Quote: "It's clear to me that there are pandemic memory problems in Firefox, and also that Mozilla has not responded adequately to them." Since that article was published, Firefox developers have fixed numerous memory management bugs, while continuing to deny that any exist.

Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems. A common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make Firefox work the way it should".

Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the Mozilla web site.

This software's history includes jail terms. Speech recognition has gotten an extremely bad reputation for being worthless garbage, maybe because it is worthless garbage.

Even a 0.5 percent recognition failure rate is enough to make speech recognition software worse than worthless. The reason is that speech recognition software never makes a spelling mistake. Instead, the mistakes are often extremely difficult to recognize, and sometimes change the meaning in subtle ways. That's partly because when the software is confused it tries to select something that is grammatically plausible.

The result is that it has become difficult to sell speech recognition software. A high enough percentage of people in the U.S. culture know that it isn't actually useful. The orginal owners of Dragon NaturallySpeaking sold the product to a company that sold it to the company that became Nuance, maybe because they felt the product was damaging the credibility of their trademarks.

Here is a quote from the ComputerWorld story linked in the earlier Slashdot story, Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?:

"In 1993 two executives from Kurzweill Applied Intelligence (which pioneered SR for the medical market) went to prison for faking sales. That firm was sold in 1997 to a Belgium SR firm, Lernout and Hauspie (L&H), which was reporting phenomenal sales growth at the time. Dragon Systems, which originated DNS that year, was reporting only anemic growth, and L&H had no trouble acquiring Dragon Systems in early 2000 in a stock deal. Within a year a series of accounting frauds came to light and L&H collapsed into bankruptcy. Its SR technology was sold in late 2001 to ScanSoft Inc., which kept the DNS line going. (It was then at Version 6.0.) ScanSoft later acquired Nuance and adopted its name.

"Thereafter, "It was with the launch of Version 8.0 (in November 2004) that the market became reinvigorated and took off," said Chris Strammiello, director of product management at Nuance. "We crossed an invisible line with Version 8.0, where the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility for the users. Sales have been growing at a rate of 30% yearly since then, except that we expect it to do better than 30% this year."

Read that again: "... the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility..." I called Nuance and was told that version 8 did not have a new recognition engine, but only had improvements in the user interface. A friend who owns and tested version 8 told me he could see no difference in accuracy between that and version 7.

So, in my opinion, Nuance has done common deceitful things that are called "Marketing":

1) Bring out new versions. Previously, when there has been a "new version" of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I call Nuance technical support and ask if there is a new recognition engine. I didn't call for version 9, but for the last two versions they have said no. So, nothing is changed; the software is still worse than useless to me, in spite of the fact that they advertise that the software is now more accurate.

How is it possible that the software is more accurate, if the recognition engine did not change? Maybe it isn't true. Or maybe the company improved the guesses the software makes when the software really has no clue what the user said. As I mentioned, those guesses have become so sophisticated that you can become confused about what you actually said, and you have to spend time re-creating your ideas. If you are saying simple things about a simple subject, this is not as much of problem as when you are writing about contract negotiations, for example.

In the words of a Slashdot reader: "The opinions expressed here may be those of my speech recognition so

Latest example:

"Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group said that the report was neither commissioned nor paid for by Microsoft. However, Burton analyst Peter O'Kelly, one of the report's co-authors, is scheduled to make a presentation at an Open XML press briefing that Microsoft plans to hold in the Seattle area on Wednesday. Also speaking will be multiple Microsoft executives involved in the Open XML standards-ratification effort."

More examples here

Graphs showing iphone is indeed 'blowing up' competition

http://blogs.computerworld.com/canalys_figures_in_iphone_clear_winner_in_north_america/

"
        * Palm is dead everywhere but in the North America, where it is falling sharply.
        * Symbian is huge everywhere besides North America, but obviously has the most to lose with the iPhone being released around the world next year. Don't expect Symbian to post these numbers on their website as they have in the past.
        * Microsoft's mobile strategy is failing miserably. They don't crack 10% anywhere but in North America where they are behind RIM and iPhone and dropping.
        * Blackberry, while strong in North America, has a much smaller global market share.
        * Linux is big in China and Japan but insignificant elsewhere.
        * The iPhone has grabbed 27% of the North American smartphone market. This is obviously on the sharp upturn.
        * Apple is poised to be the number one US Smartphone vendor next year if trends keep up."

As per http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/linux/story/0,10801,88191,00.html BCF started switching to Linux c. 1998

The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful.

Oh well. That's what patents are supposed to do. But you're trying to claim it will be imposible for OOo to compete if it CAN'T copy the ribbon? Funny, because most here say the ribbon is crap. I guess you're saying its not though, but that the open source people can't innovate anything, only copy that which was done before.

I personally find the ribbon to be crap but that's just me. However I would think one of the reason for OO is to provide an open source alternative for Microsoft monopoly on word processing. Given that it could be necessary to have an option in OO to have an alternate ribbon UI for those wanting to migrate from Office to OO. This option has now been permanently banned by Microsoft because they want to be a monoploy.

The ribbon isn't innovation it has been done many times before in other applications. Having software and UI patentable is just insane, computer methods can always be mapped into doing something using just pen and paper, adding a computer into it doesn't make it innovative. Software is also just a mathematical construct and you don't patent math. Just imagine how far we would be behind times if math was patentable.

Who are you to decide what is a waste of time for developers? MS needs to implement it because hollywood wants it. Simple as that. Now, do you have any proof anyone was bribed?

Yes exactly because Hollywood needs it, what about the wishes of the users that buy the system? If the chinese government wanted Microsoft to implement filters at the OS level to censor information then you would just be okay with that? Unfortunately the bribing can't be proven, but that doesn't you mean you can't draw your own conclusions from the episode. Just the same way as O.J was not guilty everyone knows what actually happened.

What is really ironic about Hollywood today with all their DRM and DVD price fixing is that it all started with them breaking the law and refusing to pay patent royalties to Edison.

Perhaps then you shouldn't talk as if it were a company. You might also be interested to know that IBM and many other companies actually do put money into Linux as well. But they also get lots of free help. So you think I'm an MS employee because I've been able to dismantle your argument completely? Hardly. I use their stuff and earn a living developing software with MS technology. That's about the extent of my relationship with them.

So just because you use MS technology you are just okay with them taking away all your rights? What about the freedom to use YOUR computer the way you want to? Remember they can cripple your computer anytime they like either because they want to or because of simple bugs. It saddens me that you don't seem to have critical thinking just because you get paid.

Being a big company or a government doesn't mean you are always right. Was McCarthyism just okay because it was the government doing it? What about slavery? You may say "well that was a long time ago" yes but that doesn't mean everything right now is just okay. In a 100 years people will say the same things about some of the stuff now. For example terrorism is at the same level now as communism was once. If you want to mess up someones life and credibility you just label them terrorists like you once labeled them communists and the government will react accordingly.

NASA can do it because for one they have to, lives depend on it. They also can do it because they have a larger budget and no real deadlines. Again, you switch when I call you out on something; you go from wanting 100% bug free code to "almost bug free," whatever that means.

Windows is unfortunately used in many hospitals for critical stuff so a corruption bug could b

How many other desktop OS' are in use besides Windows? Zero. Zilch.

Uhh... What? Haven't you ever heard of OS X? You know, the desktop OS that, according to Computerworld, just passed an eight percent market share?

Windows is not known to 'spontaneously corrupt' OS files any more than Linux is.

Windows is not known to 'spontaneously corrupt' OS files any more than Linux is.

Why is Windows relevant to this story at all?

Gee, who can guess which version of Windows they were running?

Microsoft's Windows Home Server corrupts files?

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=storage&articleId=9052381&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_feat

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