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I ran linux on my primary computer for 3 years, I found 9/10 applications to be acceptable at best, the games where sheer crap and support came in the form of submitting a request to a group of hack programmers or doing it myself. Really, the only thiing I honestly found it useful for is webservers, and thats due primarily to the fact that so many people already use linux for webservers that support for those applications is abundant

I'm sorry if I actually want to have an operating system thats useful for multimedia, gaming, and casual computing right out of the box. I use Linux, I have 2 boxes right next to me, one is used for running a backup of my websites, the other is a test-bed for my other web development activities. I also use OSX, I have my Mac in my Family Room, its great for graphic design and for my computer-illiterate friends and family. and finally, I have Windows on 3 computers, which I use for pretty much everything else.

I'll stick with my proprietary closed source Windows XP box, it seems to be quite secure in comparrison to Linux

Yeah, the usual. They won't say. This one is high profile, so they will move quickly. That won't save you from the other exploits that have been around for years. This one reaches back to Windoze 98, eight years of exploits!

You Apple users have no clue what you're talking about. Safari is based on Konquerer which is a simple open source browser. When Safari was first released, its rendering of layers as well as some CSS was horrible. Its improved, but geez quit kidding yourselves. And no, its not the fastest browser rendering engine.

Honestly, the best browser on the MAC right now is Firefox..period.

With that said, however, when it comes to sophisticated fast rendering engine, the honest truth is that IE 6.0+ still has a better rendering engine than Firefox on a PC. Some say its bad because its sophisticated enough to handle the barrage of spaghetti html code on the web very well. The one problem with Firefox being so sttrict is that its become a problem in terms of compatibility across the board.

Another fact is that after MS released IE 4.0 it actually handled java BETTER than Netscape. Now believe me, IE is not perfect, and there are great things about Firefox, but unlike the hype, Firefox is really no better than IE and has its share of problems.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=175007152

Apple users...well what can I say. Put some chrome on the borders with nifty buttons and then you have the ulitmate browser. Marketing folks love you to death.

Stupid editing strikes again.

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InformationWeek | Software Piracy | Trio Charged With Modifying Xboxes To Pirate Video Games | December 19, 2005

Courtesy of Google News.

IE on the Mac: Bubbye
CNET News.com- Dec 19, 2005
News on Monday that Microsoft plans to discontinue support and development of its Internet Explorer Web browser on the Macintosh hardly came as a surprise.
MS pulls plug on Mac IE Register
Microsoft Drops Support for Mac IE TechNewsWorld
VNUNet.com- InformationWeek- Techtree.com- ZDNet UK- all 112 related

Biometric scanning is not very reliable!

"Researchers at Clarkson University fooled biometric systems with fake fingerprints made out of Play-Doh nine out of ten times, demonstrating a weakness of some computer security systems." http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jh tml?articleID=175001741

True, but if you wanna play the numbers-game:

Only approximately 4.5 million users will be using podcasts by the end of 2005.

Up to 24 million users may be infected by the SONY rootkits. In addition, there ARE other rootkits out there...

Ah, well - I just felt like being a smart-ass.

So basically, it's a system that's let's me let other people see what I have, but they can't copy the file for themselves... Ingenious, from a legal standpoint, but I really doubt it'll pick up. From an older article: "The system is smart enough to identify copyrighted music that has been uploaded by users into the system."http://informationweek.com/story/showArtic le.jhtml?articleID=173402852

If the system is that smart, why would a "no-copying"policy be required? Hmmm ? Since the files being shared aren't copyrighted, I shouldn't be prohibited from sharing them.

Me says this is a piece of schizophrenic software that doesn't really know where it wants to be, and it probably will be too bandwidth hungry for most people to present any kind of interest.

But then again, maybe I haven't understood the thing :-/

Sony BMG Music's controversial copy-protection scheme can be defeated with a small piece of tape, a research firm said Monday in a demonstration of the futility of digital rights management (DRM).

According to Gartner analysts Martin Reynolds and Mike McGuire, Sony's XCP technology is stymied by sticking a fingernail-size piece of opaque tape on the outer edge of the CD.

Check this :

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=173601640

So .. uhh... Microsoft is in on this too, eh? Or is this article just completely wrong?

Here's the Slashdot crowd's chance to get the phrase invented by a Slashdotter out in the public eye. It's important that the public learn that DRM is a bad thing, and this is simply one way to tell them plainly how it is bad. DRM breaks their computer, or makes their life more difficult.

"Infected with DRM"
        Sony's rootkit has also been linked to Windows crashes, which isn't surprising to me. Most spyware causes instability in Windows because it is poorly written and designed to break parts of Windows to protect itself from removal. Sony writes, "This component is not malicious and does not compromise security. However to alleviate any concerns that users may have about the program posing potential security vulnerabilities, this update has been released to enable users to remove this component from their computers."
The incongruence of their words, is not startling to me, as they are playing a PR game to hide the fact that they messed up people's computers, and made them vulnerable to an attack that hasn't gained popularity yet, but now surely will. Virus writers will be able to easily hide their virus files using programs like Sony's cloaking DRM. Sony is lying that their cloaking DRM does not compromise security of an infected computer.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=173601122

On related news about the Sony DRM,

Antivirus companies are going to start detecting it as harmful software:

http://news.com.com/Antivirus+firms+target+Sony+co py+protection/2100-1029_3-5942265.html

The article also has claims from CA that the DRM damages the computer's ability to make rips of ANY CDs including non-copyrighted CDs.

According to Computer Associates, the Sony software makes itself a default media player on a computer after it is installed. The software then reports back the user's Internet address and identifies which CDs are played on that computer. Intentionally or not, the software also seems to damage a computer's ability to "rip" clean copies of MP3s from non-copy protected CDs, the security company said. "It will effectively insert pseudo-random noise into a file so that it becomes less listenable," said Sam Curry, a Computer Associates vice president. "What's disturbing about this is the lack of notice, the lack of consent, and the lack of an easy removal tool."

And the original patch has been replaced by one one third of the size. Mark Russinovich posted new info on the (smaller) patch on his blog showing it causes BSODs in Windows.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=173601122

Slashvertising must be cheap too.

Indeed. If you follow the link to the homepage of the submitter of this story, you'll see that it leads to Thomas Clayburn's weblog. Follow the link to the submitted article, and you'll see that it's written by Thomas Clayburn. Of course, it's not immediately obvious, because, when submitting this article, Thomas Clayburn hid behind the alias "Dotnaught".

I'm also a bit wary that Transmedia's website, the company behind this product, uses almost identical styles to both of Thomas Clayburn's websites. Just look at those grey microfonts for example, and it goes right down to similar coding styles. However, apart from superficial similarities, I didn't turn up anything definitive.

I interviewed Vint Cerf, who yesterday coincidentally was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, about U.S. control of the Net earlier in the week.

You boycott Nokia? But you just love google? Come on! Get real
Google doesn't have a patent on their software?? They have many (http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtm l?articleID=172901917). This is plain silly. And the $350K, tax exampt, self serving, PR.. Not very different from Nokia's site, only more effective with students and workd press alike.
Nothing wrong at all with software patents, as long as they are use appropriately (just like non-software patents). You don't like patents? Want to boycott companies that use them? Boycott google. Boycott Microsoft. Boycott your PC manufacturer. Boycott your food makers, electrical devices. Boycott the modern world basically.
Boycott Nokia though. It is your right, and since it is idiological one I fully support it (even if I think the reason is silly). But my suggestion is, treat all companies in the same way. Boycott all companies that use patents. Only thing is, you will be left with a very clean desktop.

Quick! If you live in WA:

1. Buy spyware CD
2. Sue Sony Corp. for $100,000
3. Profit!

An amusing article I just saw:

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=172900626

Wait...

'It's had more security bugs in this past year than IE'

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2005/07/26/ 211088/MicrosoftworksonfixasFirefoxisupdated.htm

True.

'Note: I still USE Firefox on all my machines but it's because I don't mind wasting time patching it every few weeks when another vulnerability comes out.'

Favourable comment regardless fo previous fact.


'Don't get me wrong, I love the features of Firefox but from a security standpoint I realize I'm taking a risk by using it.'

http://news.com.com/Symantec+Mozilla+browsers+more +vulnerable+than+IE/2100-1002_3-5873273.html
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=163100338

Also True.

So how exactly is this flamebait?

People who graded this as a flame are burying there heads in the sand. Firefox has become more popular it has therefore come under more attack and yes it has been found not to be particularly secure. Theres a simple reason why. No Web Browser non of them witout exception are secure nor will they probably ever be.

Take a step back from your MS bashing two seconds to realise that IE has actually been working hard on sealing its bugs up non stop since its conception. MS wasnt leaving bugs in for a laugh, and the people working on this arnt rubbish programmers or incompetant. The problem is simply overwhelming.

The idea that Firefox, which hasnt had years of being tested against a vast army of crackers, and has only even been a particular target for spyware and such relatively recently, would be more secure is ludicrous.

Now whether the speed and how they handle the security flaws is good enough to counteract the greater numbers of bugs is another argument and not one Id want to speculate on.

And what makes you think MS won't follow suit

Because they said so? While that may mean nothing, at this point it is MS' position that they will not support OpenDocument formats, regardless of requirements by governments. MS Not supporting OpenDocument

Now MS is claiming the open document standard is inferior, yet they sit on the standards committee. Instead they support the MS XML standard which is a standard for MS documents. Which means it owns (under copyright and soon patent), the format and standard.

Office 12 XML documents will not have an easy introduction into many non-Microsoft products. To do so, you will need to license the format from MS, who has said it sees no reason to support OSS in this regard and the use of MS XML in a GPL'd product would invalidate the GPL, and the MS license. (Microsoft does have some very smart lawyers writing their EULAs and contracts). All the others would need to pay a fee and it is doubtful MS would provide a discount to the disadvantage of their own products.

A better read on OpenDocument vs. MS XML is found on Wheeler's page

The format matters because a company, in part due to its responsibility to stockholders, must have planned obsolescence. MS documents from the 80s are difficult to open and read, even in MS products. An open standard ensures that my documents are available to me, through many companies, for a very long time. Governments need this and are now getting smart enough about technology to understand and demand it. And while no one can imagine MS being gone, the same was said of dozens of top 20 companies over the past 20 years.

As for the comment about the learning curve between open office and MS Office, we can now thank MS. With office 12, they cannot claim an easy transition, the product takes a new direction and whether it is better or not, is irrelevant. The learning curve of going to 12 will be greater than moving to Open Office which retains the current MS office look and feel for the vast majority of users.

The ol' invisible hand would rapidly solve the problem of assigning an appropriate value to every article and every author in the Wikipedia.

Yeah, right. Like it assigns an "appropriate value" to ear candles, RAM optimizers and penis enlargment pills.

Evidence aside, one of the PREREQUISITES for market forces to work as you believe they do is that all participants have perfect information - but the validity of the information itelf is what's being judged here! You're expecing something akin to pulling yourself up into the air by your own bootstraps.

"If you are stuck in the wake of a disaster the best thing you can do is get yourself to an evacuation camp as fast as you can (assuming they are set up). Everything, and I mean everything, else is secondary."

You're right. Thankfully, the people who evacuate don't have to set up shelters, unless you're headed to the Morial Convention Center.

"As for communications. The people coming to help you will bring their own communication that is tried and tested in emergency situation. You pay a huge amount of tax to ensure that these emergency systems are in place and can be deployed in this type of situation."

AP:

Volunteers quickly helped connect devastated areas to the outside world, proving the worth of VoIP and Wi-Fi to help re-establish communications in the aftermath of an emergency.
By Matthew Fordahl , The Associated Press

Hours after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and knocked out telecommunications across much of the region, Mac Dearman visited shelters in northern Louisiana to connect telephones.

Dearman doesn't work for a phone company.

He owns a local wireless Internet service provider, and the gear he set up doesn't need a traditional phone network. It carries calls--as well e-mail and other data--over the Internet.

"In the first 24 hours after we plugged the phones in, there were 11 family members reunited," he said. "We got a hug every time we went into a shelter to make sure things are up and running all right."

Just as Katrina proved the vulnerability of traditional telephone and cellular networks, it also showed how Internet-based technologies could be used to speedily re-establish links with the outside world.

Dearman was not alone. Teams from large companies, private groups, and the military converged on the Gulf Coast in ad hoc fashion to set up wireless networks, all the while battling bureaucracies that didn't seem to understand the agility and flexibility of the technologies being marshaled.

--

Whew. Good thing my taxes go to guys like Mac Dearman, and not to FEMA.

"And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!"

I can't get back to the article at "The Age" now, I'm getting a registration page and I'm not interested in registering so that I can copy and paste the pertinent quote. YMMV. They *might* be slashdotted.

But in the article he states that he has his W2k3 server set up to autopatch now that he has taken the RedHat server down. One of his complaints was that he couldn't automate updates on the RedHat box because they needed to compare the version of the patches with the compatible versions listed on the SAP website and it was too labor intensive. In my experience Unix (yes, I know we're discussing Linux here) has always been that way and so is any mission-critical application or OS. Or hardware for that matter. Use the wrong solution, get the wrong result.

Labor intensive repetitive tasks are the perfect place to implement scripted operations. He may need to train or hire someone to write a script to do this, but before that can happen he has to understand that it's what he needs in order to save himself time, money and man-hours. It's a conceptual gap which he may not be able to bridge.

As I posted elsewhere in response to the article, TRW is running SAP-based ERP on Dell servers and it's running fine and saving them bundles.

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=171201387/

On their website Dell offers SuSE and RedHat. No mention in the article of which one TRW uses.

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=171201387

Why can't this [relaitvely] little company in Oz make it work? Might it have soemthing to do with not running the diagnostic requested by RedHat Aus.?

I notice that he is still using Linux for lots of other stuff where it works just fine and isn't too difficult or too expensive to use.

Both from September:

From Xiti, a French Web monitoring company.

From NetApplications, a US Web monitoring company. Both say that while FF is growing, it's not growing as fast as some of the other alternative browsers. Of particular interest is that both say IE is still slowly losing ground.

Uses of the current version of Office already have the option of saving in XML data formats. However it's currently not the default but it is very simple to configure office applications to save in these formats by default. The next version Office 12 will save in xml by default
Don't be surprised if this ends up being a boon for Microsoft with governments upgrading to Office 2003 and/or Office 12.

eEye's "upcoming advisories" page is worth a look if you're interested in just how severe microsoft's lapse in patching can be. note that this page only catalogues vulnerabilities that microsoft acknowledge and the time since such acknowledgment, not since exploit nor since they were notified.

quoth eEye's product manager: "The more critical, the more pervasive the vulnerability, the longer it takes Microsoft to patch."

However some people prefer Opera because it's
1) more secure .... link 1 .... link 2 .... link 3 .... link 4 .... link 5 .... link 6, September 16th 2005
2) faster
3) Is actively worked on -from Mike Connor, an important Firefox developer
4) smaller (3.7mb vs 4.7mb)
5) less bloat/ram usage

Whenever Microsoft has a major new thing, they tout their $100 million marketing budget. Whether it's the new MSN Search, Media Center PCs, a campaign to maintain interest in Win XP as OS X Tiger was released or Windows Longhorn Vista, Microsoft marketing is at the ready with the $100 million check to buy mindshare (except for MSN 8, back in 2002. They got a $300 million budget. Remember that campaign? Me either). The best part is that, as this Slashdot article can attest, just saying you're going to spend $100M is enough to start getting some free press, though maybe not as much press as the $1 billion Windows 95 campaign.

Oh, to be fair, Apple isn't much better.

For those of you who didn't see the job announcements take a look these news articles!


IBM and SHARE Announce a New Community for the Next Generation of Mainframe Experts.

InformationWeek
Wanted: 20,000 IBM Mainframe Experts.


Visit Mainframe and see what they have to say about wonderful world of mainframes.



I submitted these on the 24th of August. Ignored as usual.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I bleed Blue!

[1] Well, all about speculation about something that will have already occured by the time you read it.

From the summary: "But one Baghdad political insider says that the imbroglio is likely to end 'imminently'--possibly by the time this magazine hits newsstands--with ICANN handing over .iq to the new government."

I have to commend the article writer, the submitter, and the editors for giving us 'news' that is obviously (obviously as in noted in the article summary) outdated. When an article tells you itself that it is outdated, that's a really, really big hint that some more research is in order before the article gets submitted and/or posted.

Of course, that's what the readers are for -- to do the research themselves and post comments with updated information.

This website has the text of a CNN article from last June explaining why .iq has not been made available to Iraq, and why reassignment has been problematic: http://forums.hostmysite.com/about228.html

Here's some news from 8/5 (over a month ago!) about the .iq reassignment: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/new s/editorial/12314495.htm

And here it is again: http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=167600327

A couple seconds with Google is all it took.

Please, submitters, you should be checking your submissions for accuracy and 'datedness'.

The problem is that every advantage that you've stated about Linux on the desktop can not be proven. Even the cost advantage can be negated if Apple or Microsoft decide to lower their prices.

My point is strictly about marketing, not technical merits. I suspect that you're unfamilar with how companies market technology, and thus would you please explain your experience in and knowledge about how companies get consumers to choose their product?

Besides, I've never been trying to prove that Linux on the desktop is better or worse then another operating system, which is what you seem to be trying to do. I'm trying to explain that all of the advantages that you've stated are either temporary, irrelevant, unproven, or blatently wrong; and that in order for Linux on the desktop to be more then a cheap knock-off, it has to have features that will be attractive to people who will pay a few more dollars to stick with a brand (Windows or Mac) that they are comfortable with.

And now back to the technical debate.

With regard to security, everything you've said about Windows is also true about Linux. http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-27.html http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=51200210 Yes, Linux historically has less issues, but it is not immune, and given Microsoft's recent attention to security, I find this argument moot for now. (BTW, Wine is not the only Windows compatibility layer.)

Linux becoming popular doesn't mean that it's making a sizable dent in Window's market share. Commercial Unixes like SCO and Solaris were the biggest victim of Linux.

Prove the argument on Linux attracting developers for desktop applications. I don't believe it. Every developer who I know, including people who are die-hard Linux users, loves working with Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. With regard to developing desktop applications, give me an example of a popular development environment on Linux? Remember, GCC is just a compiler, personal versions of VS.Net are free, and the Mono project provides some support for applications written in VS.Net on Linux.

The open standards argument doesn't apply here. You can run software that adheres to open standards on Windows. You can run other browsers and other office suites on Windows. (There was an alternate Word Processor bundled with my laptop.) Open Office runs on Windows and Mac. There is no garuntee that Microsoft will not support open office standards in the future.

With regard to content protection on Vista, it is primarily implemented in hardware and exists to appease the movie industry and to help keep documents secret. Given that restricted content will only exist if people create it and consume it, I've decided to take a wait-and-see attitude on this subject. Besides, what garuntee exists that a desktop Linux distro will not support content protection someday?

I don't think that it's a good strategy to sell a Linux-based desktop computer by calling Microsoft evil. Do you? Is "moral right" a good selling point?

Please put your comments on Vista on hold. We're talking about how to sell a desktop computer with Linux, not how to sell a desktop computer with Vista.

You can not walk into Walmart and buy a desktop computer with Linspire. They are only available off of Walmart's web site.

Again, before continuing a technical debate, I'd like to know how much experience you have in marketing. My original "knock-off" statement only had to do with marketing, and not Linux's technical merits, which I really prefer to avoid because its merits do make it desirable in markets other then the desktop.

Air Force Personnel Info May Have Been Hacked

NWS has been allowed to do more under new policy issued by NOAA last December. However, under pressure, NOAA is now proposing slight changes to the policy. NOAA is accepting comments until Nov 1.
Just what this change means is difficult to understand since it depends on how you define NOAA's mission, or how the Dept of Commerce and NOAA leadership at the time of any specific issues define the misssion.
Information Week had a very nice article the other week that explained the issues.

NWS has been allowed to do more under new policy issued by NOAA last December. However, under pressure, NOAA is now proposing slight changes to the policy. NOAA is accepting comments until Nov 1.
Just what this change means is difficult to understand since it depends on how you define NOAA's mission, or how the Dept of Commerce and NOAA leadership at the time of any specific issues define the misssion.
Information Week had a very nice article the other week that explained the issues.

Newer chips from intel and amd will probably enable xen to work without modifying the OS.
http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=167600468

Fascinating. Can you cite any references to support your statement?

Gladly...

Identity management looks esp poor for RH when you compare that old krufty Netscape thing that RH bought vs. a stable and extremely mature (over 1 billion served) eDirectory product which is light years ahead of even Active Directory.

I freely admit that some of these articles are a bit long in the tooth however the directory services software landscape hasn't changed dramatically in the last few years. MS' last AD schema change was in 2003 and that wasn't an earth shattering update or anything.

You can find anecdotal evidence for any situation. Anecdotal evidence has a 100% margin of error. The reality is, Mac computer sales are HOT right now. They are experiencing year over year growth of sales higher than any other computer maker. The intel announcement appears to have done nothing to slow their growth in computer sales.

Unbelievably stupid. Or, as Mitch Wagner observed:

• InformationWeek Weblog: Dumb As A Bag Of Hammers

And even he doesn't cover all the problems; for example, as everyone with the slightest clue about spam has known for years, responding to the spammer in any way is absolutely idiotic.

But since the people involved in this company have no anti-spam credentials, no track record of involvement, and no clue how their "counter-attacks" will be neatly retargeted (surely nobody is naive enough to believe that spammers will sit still for this?) I can't say I'm surprised. This is merely the latest bonehead idea in a long series (e.g. challenge-response, callbacks, SPF, etc.) of bonehead ideas put forth by people who have clearly failed to comprehend even the rudimentary aspects of the spam problem...or who have, but simply do not care about the conequences for everyone else as long as they can selfishly "solve" their part of the problem.

I've already blacklisted the company behind this tripe and null-routed their address space. I recommend the same for everyone else. There's simply no place on the Internet for those who want to profit from our collective misery by making it worse.

Microsoft's top finance executives project stronger-than-average, double-digit revenue growth going forward, fueled by SQL and Visual Studio upgrades in its server and tools division. The Redmond, Wash., software giant also expects the launch of the Xbox 360 game console later this year to drive more than 50 percent revenue growth in its home and entertainment division.

As of 2:35 PM, the summary looks like this:

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday July 19, @02:26PM
from the murdoch-immediately-propositioned-for-cyber dept.
jagger writes "a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495. stm">News Corp announced on Monday that it , owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=166400491&tid=13692">for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."

More correctly, it should look like this:

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday July 19, @02:26PM
from the editing-is-for-wimps dept.
someguy writes News Corp is a massive media conflomerate owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. News Corp recently announced that they are moving into the internet market, with the acquisition of Intermix media, which runs the popular MySpace.com social networking site. For more information, refer to this BBC news article, and this information week article.

BBC Article text is:

News Corp in $580m internet buy

News Corp, the company run by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has made one of its first major internet purchases.

It has bought Intermix Media, owner of Myspace.com, the fifth most-viewed internet domain in the US and owner of other sites for $580m (£332.85m).

Mr Murdoch says the networking site will drive traffic to his Fox TV sites.

Last week the company set up a new internet unit. Mr Murdoch has said that newspapers have been slow to respond to competition from the internet.

Advertising advantage

"With a significant amount of advertising dollars moving from traditional outlets to online, News Corp, like most media companies, is looking to boost its internet assets," Alan Gould, an analyst at Natexis Bleichroeder, told Reuters.

The US market for internet advertising is growing at 15% in 2005, according to media buyers Universal McCann.

Myspace.com users connect to the site for dating, making friends, professional networking and sharing interests.

Earlier this year, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer accused Intermix of deceptive business practices, including the use of spyware that delivered pop-up adverts and redirected users to its search engine.

Intermix agreed to pay $7.9m to settle the suit but did not admit wrongdoing.

InformationWeek article:

News Corp. To Acquire Intermix Media July 18, 2005

The move triples News Corp.'s reach among U.S. Internet users and makes it a player in the online social-networking market. By Antone Gonsalves
InternetWeek

News Corp. on Monday said it has agreed to acquire Intermix Media Inc., which owns more than 30 e-commerce and media websites, for $580 million in cash, tripling News Corp.'s reach among U.S. Internet users and making it a player in the online social-networking market.

In a separate deal, Intermix announced on Monday that it has acquired the 47 percent of social networking site MySpace.com that it didn't already own.

In the News Corp. agreement, the Los Angeles based media giant would pay $12 per common share of Intermix stock, or about $580 million. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter, pending approval of Intermix stockholders.

MySpace.com and Intermix's other

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday July 19, @02:26PM
from the murdoch-immediately-propositioned-for-cyber dept.
jagger writes "a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495. stm">News Corp announced on Monday that it , owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."

"News Corp announced on Monday that it was the new owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, paying $580 million for it. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."

If is isn't enough to publish dupes everyday, now BROKEN CODE made it onto the front page.

Are you sure that Zonk checked this?

It should read "News Corp announced on Monday that it, owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million. This follows an announcement by News Corp on Friday that it is creating an Internet division to hold the company's sports, news and entertainment sites."

Yeah, at the University of North Carolina, full story is here: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010409S0 001

Find me a DOS version that supports USB hardware, and a USB storage device that can talk to DOS over said hardware, AND that I can boot DOS from if I need to, and I will consider giving up floppies.

• http://www.fdos.org/freedos/news/newsitem/149.html
• http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021003S0 007
• http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm (how-to)

• Util from HP that some claim works with generic USB drives
  

Apparently, there were objections from Microsoft when DHS started to point out that Microsoft was the problem. What's left of the "National Cyber Security Division" actually seems to be CMU's CERT plus a front man, Andy Purdy, in Washington.

Content management systems like Knowledge Tree may be great, if that's what you want to do -- complex content management with document metadata and expiry dates, etc. However, keep in mind that it is something extra for your users to figure out and something extra to be monitored or repaired when things go south.

Samba will let your clients connect to the file server in a way they're presumably already familiar with: their desktop's file system. Nothing new to learn except how to connect and, maybe, which folder to put things in if they are to be visible on the web.

Mod_WebDAV can be added to Apache so users have an alternate route to edit their files.

Both Samba and Apache can be tied to LDAP and/or Kerberos so that you can use your existing authentication and directory services.

I've set up a small number of Apache,WebDAV,Samba, Kerberos systems. The main drawback is that once users know how to connect, it's too easy for them compared to the old CMS which was being used as a file management system. That may make them feel they are missing something. They may even forget they have a "file management" system even while they are using it. No joke. So plan on scheduling time at the end of the project to make sure the users know what they have and that the management appreciates how smooth it is to use. And that you get credit for not having to go to heroic effort to fix things every time a student wants to upload a file. Otherwise it may end up like the proverbial walled-in Netware server.

No, there's not. Or I guess we'd have to define "a whole bunch". To quote...

"The actual impact of a network disruption would depend on a variety of factors, such as the cities affected by the disruption. Grubesic said the most severe impacts would occur if telecommunications equipment were destroyed in the six largest Internet hubs: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

For example, Los Angeles is a major hub location connecting other large cities in the South and West. If Los Angeles were eliminated as a node on the Internet, many other cities in California may not have Internet access. But it would also hurt Internet accessibility in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Dallas and Houston, the study suggests."

Yes, there are a lot a peering arangements between providers and so on, but there's only so much fibre running out directly from one major city to the next. Traffic routes from your house to an ISP to major carriers to congregate at a hub, travels out along the same backbone to the next hub, and fans back out again in reverse.

It's how, to give a recent example, Pakistan went dark due to a single damaged undersea cable.

Looks like MercExchange does and despite eBay not licensing their patents, others have.

What is interesting is that this comes about a month after the theft of about 600,000 customer records by TimeWarner cable (http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtm l?articleID=162101437/).

The data went missing while in transit to an Iron Mountain facility by a truck. Sounds like a very similar incident here. In the TimeWarner article, the Iron Mountain corp was quoted as saying that they have the technology that would allow companies to use incremental backups to copy their data to the Iron Mountain center electronically thus eliminating the truck but I guess companies are either not listening or finding it cheaper to ground-ship the data... Perhaps after all these massive thefts at TimeWarner, Bank of America, Wachovia, and now Citigroup, companies will reconsider how they back up their data..

Perhaps they will start to use Armor trucks instead of UPS ground to ship their customer's records, once the law-suits start streaming in...

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http://unk1911.blogspot.com/