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Why would anyone expect Microsoft to engage in such combat? Especially since the person in charge of Microsft's Open Source strategy famously wrote:

http://www.informationweek.com...

".. our PREFERRED plan is to LICENSE ... versus LITIGATE."

Gotta love Microsoft. Always thinking about our welfare. Or not.

Actually, Google specifically assumes that your privacy does have value to you, and that you should be able to decide what you'll trade it for.

Of course, then there's THIS .

http://thenextweb.com/google/2...
wages are $12-$14 in US, $4 in China, rest is offset by cheaper shipping.
http://www.informationweek.com...?
Says something about $5 difference, and gives a good breakout of hardware costs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Says $4.

So I was off, but not by much, it appears that China just isn't cheap anymore. In the US they are more likely to use machines to assemble where possible, in China, they historically considered people less expensive, but that may have changed over the years.

Feeling grumpy?
From page 2 of the linked article:
Apple Macintosh computers and servers running OSX use NTP, and Stenn said Apple developers have called him for help on several NTP issues. In the last such incident, he said he delayed a patch to give Apple more time to prepare OS X for it. When they were ready, he applied the patch and asked "whether Apple could send a donation to the Network Time Foundation," Stenn recalled. "They said they would do their best to see that Apple throws some money our way." But it hasn't happened yet.

Apparently somebody is under the impression that OSX still uses it, unfortunately this is how the business majors deal withit:
"Everybody loves us," Stenn said. "But people with money say, 'We don't give to open source projects.'"
http://www.informationweek.com...

They already have microsoft source code...for example see: http://www.informationweek.com...?

byte.com -> http://www.informationweek.com... -> 404...

Such a shame

It's all PR talk until they actually do anything about it.

They already did something. Unfortunately, the courts agreed with Verizon and made them un-do it.

reference

I've been reading for 20+ years about these things called Macs that are far safer than Windows, and yet, somehow, nobody actually uses them.

"Nobody"? Even in the enterprise?

The rest of your comment misses my point: Perhaps in theory, OS X is "just an vulnerable," and maybe the OS X market share means malware authors don't bother. But whatever the causes, in the real world today, the results are undeniable: less malware on Macs.

I used Aperture for several years. It's a very nice application. However, Apple killed it, so I wouldn't start using it.
http://www.informationweek.com...

I switch to digikam at the beginning of this year. Its been working great.

I'm surprised no-one here has mentioned it: this is a tragedy of the commons.

It's unfortunate to be put in a situation of having to choose between being a sucker or a cheat. It's not exactly hypocrisy to perform tax-avoidance whilst supporting better tax laws.

If everyone else is over-fishing, you'd be a sucker to be the only one holding back, but you might still be in favour of over-fishing laws.

I recommend Bruce Schneier's book on these matters.

Fix?
Infoweek notes:

"If you were a pizza delivery man, how would you benefit from scissors?" -- Apple, Specialist interview.

I would be equipped to become a pizza delivery woman.

The trouble is that facebook et al are subject to the patriot act - this means that all the govt of the USA needs to do is say ''give me this data'' and they have to do it. The data can be anywhere in the world, if they can access it they need to give it to the NSA/... upon demand and can be stopped from telling anyone what they have done.

No, the trouble is that the jurisdiction of the Patriot Act (and all other US laws) ends at the US border; regardless of what agencies like the NSA like to believe. If US companies won't (or feel they can't) abide by the laws of the foreign countries in which they trade, then they'll just have to stop trading in those countries.

The economic impact on US tech companies of Prism, the Patriot Act, etc. is not exactly news; NSA's Prism Could Cost U.S. Cloud Companies $45 Billion - InformationWeek.

According to this article Apple bought Beats because the Apple brand is fading. Tim Cook is buying what Steve Jobs created from within.

Oh, I don't know about that...

For instance, federal employees are allowed to use blogs and social networks to express support for candidates for office when they are not at work, but they can't engage in online activity supporting a candidate while on duty or at a federal workplace.

Also in the article is a link to the policy as released in 2010.

Questions?

Look what came up in the search. From the link:

The message for businesses: Don't spend too much time worrying about mobile threats. "Don't completely forget it, but apportion your resources toward the actual risk in the real world, which isn't very much"

Next up: Intel Secure Core with integrated virusscanning.

You laugh, but from the sounds of it, Intel is planning on putting chips in everything -- which means they'll likely become security nightmares.

As the AC says below, this is not the only victim but the first major one to be published in detail with the exact verbiage because of the NSA. This should also make you question all of these reports claiming "economic recovery" in the US. It was reported back in June when the leaks first came out that CISCO lost numerous contracts due to the NSA. [snark]But of course we are all just crazy conspiracy theorists, so the facts below are nothing more than racist attacks against Obama [/snark]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/how-nsa-mass-surveillance-hurting-us-economy
http://business.time.com/2013/12/10/nsa-spying-scandal-could-cost-u-s-tech-giants-billions/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/07/nsa-snooping-could-cost-u-s-tech-companies-35-billion-over-three-years/
http://www.storyleak.com/nsa-spying-us-companies-billions-american-job-loss/
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/nsas-prism-could-cost-us-cloud-companies-$45-billion/d/d-id/1111178?

Funnily, Slashdot doesn't usually report things when it's the other way around(guess why??!!)

This employee could see the Google+ disaster coming from a mile(which actually made some real people cry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs )

http://www.informationweek.com/team-building-and-staffing/google-exec-joins-microsoft-trashes-google/d/d-id/1103367?

Google Exec Joins Microsoft, Trashes Google
Google's focus on social and advertising is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, insists former engineering director James Whittaker.

Slideshow: 10 Essential Google+ Tips
(click image for larger view and for slideshow)
James Whittaker resigned his engineering director position at Google last month and took a job at Microsoft, where he had worked previously. Then on Tuesday, in a Microsoft Developer Network blog post, he explained his reason for leaving Google: The company has lost its way by blindly trying to compete with Facebook.

"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate," Whittaker wrote. "The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."

Whittaker's lament recalls the so-called Peanut Butter Manifesto published in 2006 by then-Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse. There's a difference however: Garlinghouse proposed reforms for Yahoo; Whittaker's criticism merely burns a bridge.

It also echoes a post made by Tim Bray, who upon joining Google in 2010 as an Android developer advocate, took the opportunity to slam Apple's lack of openness (though Bray did not work at Apple).

And then there's a website devoted to the problems with Windows 8, presented by Mike Bibik, a former Microsoft program manager now at Amazon.

"Why I Left" is also now playing outside the tech community. Departing Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith offered a comparable condemnation of his former employer in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday.

Perhaps this particular literary form should be known as a "Whine-I-Left" letter.

[ Not everyone believes Google has lost its way. Read DARPA Director Leaving For Google. ]

Whittaker draws a contrast between Google under former CEO Eric Schmidt and Google under current CEO Larry Page. The Schmidt regime, he asserts, "was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder's awards, peer bonuses and 20% time." Ads, the company's primary source of revenue remained in the background.

Whittaker appears to believe that ads, like a parent at a teen's party, should remain out of sight, to avoid the embarrassment of exposing who's really in charge.

Under Page, Whittaker says, Google has devoted itself to making its products social, at the expense of innovation and entrepreneurship. And to make matters worse, Whittaker believes Google's social focus is a failure.

Google was wrong to claim that sharing on the Web is broken, Whittaker argues. "As it turned out, sharing was not broken," he said. "Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn't part of it. ... Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn't invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google's party became the elephant in the room."

Whittaker's pique appears to be tailor made for Microsoft. He acknowledges that he doesn't enjoy the invasiveness of Google's social integration or the company's ads. Microsoft has been talking up Google's disinterest in privacy for years and many people nowadays, particularly legislators, are listening.

Current and former Google employees have been quick to question Whittaker's motives. In a Google+ pos

No one should take any of this seriously. It's all a propaganda campaign to make drones the "happy, friendly eye in the sky" that brings your new shiny, not the one that violates your privacy or guns-down your grandma by accident. I, for one, applaud eBay for seeing through the bullshit and telling it like it is. There is much more here than meets the eye.
 
  How do you beat IBM for big iron?

Not that the site didn't have problems, but what about this? Republicans and DDoS of ACA website

http://www.informationweek.com/security/vulnerabilities-and-threats/hackers-threaten-destruction-of-obamacare-website/d/d-id/1112207?

You're confusoing two different things. App sandbox (on Android) with App Store Approvals (on iOS).

No, I'm not "confusing" or "ignoring" anything.

Listen up: recent scandals have demonstrated that Apple's "sandbox" DOESN'T WORK for things like this, as Chalie Miller and a lot of others found out.

Ultimately, keeping withing Apple's "sandbox" is up to the developer, and if you have a malicious developer, it makes no difference.

That was part of my point. No, app developer CAN'T do a lot more on Android than they do on iOS. Lots of people keep saying that but the distinction is illusory. The ONLY difference is that on iOS, they're slightly more likely to get caught because of the app vetting that Apple does.

Firewire DMA attacks are well documented and used in the field, but that isn't what I was referring to. Also, you are missing a step in your statement: USB has to go to the USB Controller first, which is its own microprocessor, so there is a little more room for bugs. Honestly, you didn't respond to a single thing I posted.

Here are a few examples of some exploits in USB drivers for Windows/Linux. It's well known at this point that physical access to a machine means game over, but exploitable USB drivers make it all too easy. What's that? Kernel level drivers exploitable that were patched only this year? The magnitude of this problem is vast. Any device in the USB protocol can represent itself as any vendor/product id it wants, and attack that driver specifically. Do you even want to know how many drivers are bundled in modern OS's?

High frequency (perhaps not technically 'ultrasonic') transmission of data can be done in JavaScript so this, too, is plausible at many levels. Note: we are discussing networking over sound, not exploiting.

Frankly, I'm really disappointed at the lack of imagination I am seeing in a lot of these Slashdot posts.

H1B's exist to drive down labor rates in the US, screwing over folks who are already here and they're not necessarily getting the best talent either. If you're telling me that Quality Shit Software couldn't find qualified candidates in the beltway for this project, then you're full of crap. That's not racist by the way and I object to the use of the term, but since QShit was looking for Business Analysts and Engineers, I know that there are plenty of those in DC who could have done the job. There's lots of these outfits out there, WiPro, InfoSys, Tata and others who use the H1B and pay less than other companies for the same work and sell themselves as saving money for the companies they work for. These are Indian outsourcing firms and they get called out even in their own nation. If we're going to have H1B Visas in this nation, then we damn well better insist that 1) Companies who are sponsoring H1Bs have done their due diligence in trying to find a qualified candidate already here. That means verification with screening results not just Taleo bullshit disqualification. 2) That the wages the H1B employee are paid are at least above the 80% percentile for the work, in the area where they're working and only for the duration of that work. 3) Once the work is finished, if the H1B candidate doesn't have a Green Card or is not on the path to citizenship, they need to go back and not job hop. Did you also know that the top ten sponsors of H1B visas or offshore outsourcing companies? That's another gap that has to be fixed, specifically companies that are in the body shop business need to be excluded from sponsoring H1Bs. I'm for letting people work in this country but the playing field needs to be a bit more balanced and indexed on unemployment figures as well, if that's racist to you then fuck off.

Snow on the car image sensors will make the car blind.

Frost on my windshield will make me blind, so I wait until it defrosts to take off just as an autonomous car will.

Ice on the road will be nearly impossible for the car to distinguish.

Pretty damned hard for a human to distinguish, too. But the car will have the advantage of being able to see in wavelengths that make the ice and snow completely transparent.

I wish I could be more optimistic but driverless cars will be as useful as google glass appears to be.

Oddly, you may be right. I would have disagreed with you until I saw this. Seems there's a use for Google Glasses after all.

"Twitter Becomes TV Remote" Via connections between smartphone, Twitter, and cable box, you can now involve "the cloud" in TV channel changing. Really.

Eric Zeman | September 28, 2013 09:06 AM

I've spent a week using the Apple iPhone 5s as my primary device. In general, it is a solid effort on Apple's part, but it is not without its faults. Here are some of the strong points and weak points I've observed over the last seven days.

iOS 7 is a bit buggy on the 5s. I've installed iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, an iPad 3, and an iPad Mini. It runs best on the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. On the iPhone 5s, iOS 7 is prone to app crashes. Third-party app crashes aren't too awful, but when native apps such as the Settings Menu and Safari crash, you know something's not right.

The hardware is fine, if unexciting. The 5s is a solid little device. Apple designed it with care and everything about it exudes quality and class. The display is great, even if it is smaller than I'd like, and the small form factor makes it easy to carry around and use.

It's not the best voice phone. I've been testing an AT&T model of the iPhone 5s and am not impressed with its phone calls. I heard lots of interference and the earpiece speaker doesn't get quite loud enough. The speakerphone produces plenty of volume, but it also amplifies the interference. The iPhone is a better voice phone.

The battery hasn't given me any trouble. The first few days were a bit iffy, but that's true of most smartphones. Once the battery cycled through a few charges, it settled into a good rhythm. I routinely got a full day out of it, despite heavy use. It's worth noting, though, that the battery cannot be removed or replaced, so you're stuck with what's sealed in the iPhone 5s.

The camera is great. The new software, combined with the improved sensor, go a long way toward making the iPhone 5s one of the best camera phones available. The camera app is simpler to use and includes more features, such as burst mode and slow-motion video capture, and the results are on par with today's best devices. The improved gallery app is far more powerful when it comes to organizing photos, and some of the editing tools are a welcome addition.

iOS 7 is still inflexible. Apple's simple smartphone/tablet user interface may win usability awards, but it is nowhere near as flexible or customizable as Android or even Windows Phone. The inability to control exactly where apps are positioned is frustrating, and the lack of resizable home screen widgets and apps leaves the OS looking too homogenous. I'd love to see some truly dynamic content on the home screen.

Control Center is convenient. Apple's new dashboard for controlling some of the iPhone 5s's features is a big help. It makes simple tasks such as turning on and off the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios a breeze. I also like the fact that it includes controls for the music player as well as apps like the flashlight, calculator, timer, and camera. This is definitely a time saver, considering that it took several steps to reach many of these controls in previous versions of iOS.

There's plenty to like about the 5s, but at the end of the day it offers only a slightly different experience than last year's iPhone 5. The Touch ID fingerprint sensor is the biggest difference. The camera and processor improvements in the 5s, though very real, aren't all that much better than the iPhone 5. We can only hope that Apple will make significant changes in next year's iPhone 6.

Link: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/apple-iphone-5s-my-first-week/240161890

Who is forcing? My iPhone 5 is still working just fine on iOS 6. I upgraded the iPad Mini and it's working just fine, but I'm not ready to mess with the phone, got too much stuff on there to just run out and upgrade to the latest and greatest before it's been properly tested by 200 million beta testers [businessinsider.com].

I'll wait for 7.1, then wait two weeks after that.

I admire Android users fearlessness though, to run an OS that freely gives complete control over everything to any app or website. I have no idea how Android users sleep at night, knowing their Android phone can be remotely wiped and reset to factory settings simply by visiting a website.

"The iPhone 5 is the most difficult device that Foxconn has ever assembled. To make it light and thin, the design is very complicated," said an anonymous company official to The Wall Street Journal. "It takes time to learn how to make this new device. Practice makes perfect. Our productivity has been improving day by day."

http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/smart-phones/foxconn-iphone-5-is-hard-to-make/240009249

If you want a device you can sell for 99 bucks on contract it needs to be easier to make.

The story where MSFT pulled some of the patches?

http://www.informationweek.com/security/management/microsoft-pulls-exchange-server-security/240160034

Yeah, your *three* computers may not have been affected. But lots were.

Every gov knows what Russia, the UK and US do with their "Consulate" floors

Oh come now A., the club is bigger than that! The majority of countries get in on the spy game at some level.
The Germans: The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy
Very involved in the current crisis: Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press
The Finns and Swedes can't be left out: Supo wants expanded net surveillance powers
Nor the French: France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'
The club is bigger still: Think US snooping is bad? Try Italy, India orCanada
Thousands of Russian spies in US: ex-CIA agent
Gordievsky: Russia has as many spies in Britain now as the USSR ever did
Chinese Spies Targeting U.K., MI5 Warns
But of course! Chinese use honeytraps to spy on French companies, intelligence report claims
Germany accuses China of industrial espionage
Germany targets Russian, Chinese spies
Spies in Sweden mostly from China, Russia, Iran
Number of Foreign Spies on the Rise in Finland
Austrian capital ‘filled with Iranian spies’
Foreign spies targeting Polish shale - Natural Gas Europe
Spain arrests three suspected of spying for Iran
Russia warns Ireland it will retaliate in spy row
FBI releases papers on Russian Irish spies in US - ‘Ghost Stories’

Sometimes the trails can get very complicated.

For some reason this video comes to mind: Its a Small World

I heard that MS will give them away to schools. It's a win-win for MS. They get the tax write-off and look like they are doing something for charity. Also they may get a generation used to using Surface when they wouldn't have purchased one.

Citation, please?

From Information Week

SCO last week tried to subpoena Jones as a witness in the case, but efforts to locate her in the town of Darien, Conn., -- where she supposedly calls home -- proved fruitless, according to a report on Forbes.com that was confirmed to InformationWeek on Wednesday by a SCO insider.

If you want to use an "Office" type application (either the free one or the proprietary one) you need a real computer

I know, I know.... but this is indeed the biggest selling point of the Windows tablet family - the ability to run Office and Outlook.

http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/microsoft-needs-3-surface-tablets-3-reas/240159781

Support for Office, including Outlook, meanwhile means the device could be useful not only for content consumption but also as a BYOD companion device.

Since ESX is based on Linux that means that MS is losing marketshare in the server room? Wha?

That's like claiming that Windows is losing marketshare because routers and switches don't run MS software.

And with the advancements of HyperV in Server 2012 it seems that MS is gaining virtualization marketshare back from VMWare. Sorry if that burns your theory on the matter but HyperV in S2012 is very well done and your assumptions show that you don't keep up on the cutting edge of virtualization.

The TECH IS BETTER THAN THAT by far: RFID Ink: http://www.informationweek.com/invisible-rfid-ink-safe-for-cattle-and-p/196802844 and this: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=Holographic+tatoos&oq=Holographic+tatoos&gs_l=serp.12..0i22i10i30.1987.7651.1.8892.18.16.0.2.2.0.190.1509.12j4.16.0....0...1c.1.22.serp..0.18.1528.TBOPwp10HKg&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=ed130d34d083288c&biw=1600&bih=896 (Holographic Tattoos) - that, if anything, IS how THAT part of prophecy (ala "the Number of the Beast") will be implemented... mark my words.

* What will the 'tatoo' be? A UPC SYMBOL & this is where it gets REALLY INTERESTING on that account -> http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=UPC+666

(Yes, I've worked with UPC codes in the past in industrial environs programming around them in my past circa 1999-2001 & IMMEDIATELY NOTED what those will show you... scared the hell out of me, due to its potentials...)

The UPC won't be like you see on products (incredible tracking & history/inventory power) - it'll be MORE like something you ALREADY have (your drivers license) & the "stacked" variety of them (same base design though)... your eye doesn't even HAVE to see it (not visible spectrum stuff) - but, a laser scanner can.

APK

P.S.=> Scary world folks... apk

There is basic pay, plus “entitlements” for everything from serving in a combat zone to housing allowances to re-enlistment bonuses. An individual’s pay can change several times in a day.

likely the old software can't deal with all of that to well.

http://www.informationweek.com/government/state-local/outdated-it-blocks-california-payroll-or/225702383

Does it hurt to be as ignorant as you are, or does the ignorance come with some sort of pain-reducing features of its own?

What is PR.

Some news articles that would probably not exist without PR professionals:
http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/trends/how-linux-foundation-runs-its-virtual-of/240156624
http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-to-support-linux-kvm-virtualization-on-power-systems/
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Linux-Mint-15-A-better-Ubuntu-for-the-desktop-1873682.html

I just randomly picked Linux as a search item in Google News. It could have been anything. Almost everything you read in a publication was "sold" to that publication by a PR professional. Did you think journalists actually spent time researching and finding out stuff on their own? Honestly, if it wasn't sold by a PR agency, you probably never heard about it.

and who knows what sort of pressure the government was leveraging on these companies to get them on board.

"Nice business you have there selling to defense/intelligence/etc. government customers. Shame if something happened to it...."

Think about it: Barnes and Noble called them out on it *and won* since they have a good argument for the Doctrine of Laches (regarding the NDA's). Which estopped MS from collecting anything on the patents in question

Reference needed about the "winning" part. In fact, B&N ended up having to pay licensing fees on the patents.

http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/barnes-noble-deal-shows-microsofts-pate/232901214

Don't believe everything you read on the agenda-driven Groklaw.