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"Consumers hope to drop Apple as computer supplier"

It seems like quite the opposite is happening.

No, apple is suing samsung because they are working on android which is a competitor to iphone. What else do you call going for the ITC loophole and other anticompetitive moves ?

You don't hear apple saying shit about "Defending" anything. This is all claims of "Samsung stole from us" which = offensive = patent trolling. If it was "UI design lifting" it'd be a copyright lawsuit not a patent lawsuit.

This is not fucking difficult.

Yes, it was left up to the reader to find the second worst possible scenario. The only thing worse would be anything less than 94.99%, which would mean that you get the entire service for free.

Why not mention 365 possible days of downtime, or even 19 days per year? After all, it's just as possible as 18 days per year for 50% off.

Not only was the summary intentionally misleading, but it was a downright lie when he mentioned Google's "100%" claim that I took at face value. The Google article never even mentions 100% uptime.

GMail is quoted in the article for 2010 having a 99.984% uptime.

Plus I've had Microsoft hosted Exchange for almost 2 years now and can't remember a single outage.

I call bullshit. I have had BPOS with my company for almost a year and have experienced several outages (I am keeping track because this was upper managments call against the advice of IT):

22 June 2011
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-confirms-bpos-cloud-outage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/23/bpos_outage/

10-13 May 2011
http://www.katacinta.net/cinta/microsoft-online-outage-may-10/
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/386384/outage_hits_hosted_exchange_customers/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/hosted-exchange-customers-hit-service-outages-981
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216697/Microsoft_explains_recent_hosted_e_mail_outages

6 March 2011:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesexchange/thread/7017abf4-a9d9-4c08-85ac-f66912124493/
19 October 2010
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicesannouncements/thread/e72e8707-7457-4737-b246-2598769e54cf/
3 & 7 September 2010 & 23 Aug 2010
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-bpos-down-for-90-minutes-second-outage-in-a-month/7302
http://mcpmag.com/articles/2010/09/10/microsoft-reports-major-bpos-outages-slas-affected.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/09/08/meeting-your-and-our-own-expectations.aspx
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-apologizes-for-spate-of-recent-online-services-outages/7337

http://www.infoworld.com/print/164900

There should be a law against submitting these to slashdot.

Here here! If you HAVE to, at least submit the print version people!

abstraction layers on top? JQuery type implementations.

Those already exist for mobile devices, jQuery Mobile included.

IT may have rules and procedures in place for good reasons, but all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner to put IT in control of business, instead of the other way around.

You say that now. Then the Department Manager of your department, or the VP of Asshattery, gets caught doing various illegal things from his work desktop and IT gets word from on high to either (a) "cooperate fully" with a police investigation, (b) figure out how to hide it so it doesn't get to a police investigation, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b) that may or may not be legal.

Departments should be stating business cases and needs and IT should be helping figure out how they can help accomplish these. Frequently, this is not how it works.

Everywhere I have worked, the process has gone line this:
- Department states business case. Part of the time, business case involves a complete lack of understanding of how the technology currently owned/operated by the company works. Part of the time, business case involves unrealistic assumptions like "it'll only take a couple days to move us from our current server environment to a completely different architecture." Part of the time, business case is actually reasonable.

- IT then figures out (a) what needs to be done to make it happen, (b) whether it can be done in a time-effective manner given the existing IT workload and available staff, (c) what it will cost to temp or outsource it if not. Sometimes there is also (d), whether the new toy the fuckwit VP du jour has purchased on company funds even does what he thinks it will do and how the FUCK to integrate it into the existing network.

The stories from developers fighting with IT are endless and all of them are countered by the same basic fear card and the general statement that users are idiots.

That's because for every story like yours, there are a dozen or more fuckwits like this or morons like this that the IT department has to contend with.

There is a general arrogance that we are on "their" systems and not that they are managing "our" systems.

And what you fail to consider is that "they" are caught between you, the user, and the weight of the company heads screaming the usual, contradictory priorities:

#1 Priority - "Just make everything work."
#1 Priority - "Keep everything safe."
#1 Priority - "Give the users what they want."
#1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things."
#1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."

Nothing that comes from "on high" for IT is ever not a "#1 Priority." IT is one of the most thankless tasks in existence. If everything is running well, people forget they exist. If something breaks or has to be taken offline for maintenance, someone is inevitably screaming bloody hell. Then they have to deal with mobile devices, 18 gazillion models of phone that everyone wants to hook in to company email, traveling flash drives that are a danger vector for worms coming in and corporate espionage going out...

Try putting yourself in their shoes once in a while. IT aren't the bad guys. They're stuck in a terrible position, under PHB's that make your department's PHB look like an utter genius by comparison, and your PHB is the guy who once took a week sick off of work after accidentally supergluing his hand to the family cat.

Your ideas intrigue me (and I was considering subscribing to your newsletter), so I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, running Android 3.1 with the stock browser and Adobe Flash Player 10.3.

Predictably, the Flash page-turner doesn't show up (even with plugins set to "Always On"). I get a white screen with a list of links to pages. When I click a link, it sends me a 21.25MB PDF of the report.

But I've said before that I think Flash on Android is useless, and people got all mad and said I was in Apple's pocket. I still challenge anyone to show me something useful they can do with the Flash Player installed on an Android device that they couldn't have done already.

I think more likely that a vendor with laugh at Microsoft, spit in their face, and go with Android.

Maybe that's their plan.

I'm no MS apologist ( I run slack on my laptop and Ubuntu server at work, eucalyptus cloud), but there is a whole lot of inaccuracies here. Any kernel level malware invalidates your "literally impossible" file replacement argument.

And yet, you fail to explain how. And yes, the rest of your comment firmly labels you as a Windows (or at least Windows Registry) apologist.

The original execution of the registry was poor, but the concept of a fast and reliable btree key-value store for all your program settings isn't that idiotic (think dbus, gnomeconf, etc).

ANY centralized database of critical configuration information is inherently fragile. Period. And doubly so with the Windows registry, because it is such a mess.

The modern windows registry has plenty of permissions built in the important areas, although it is admittedly a mess of disorganization still.

Permissions are only good until the filesystem is tricked into ignoring them with a privilege escalation. And since most Windows users still run as Administrator, that isn't even necessary.

There are plenty mechanisms to restore a registry; in fact it can be rebuilt in parts if need be. You can walk the structure and recreate the index. UBCD has an excellent one, for example.

That assumes you both know which of the hundreds or thousands of keys have been affected, and then, what you need to set those keys' values to.

If you want to get on a soapbox against MS, there are plenty of arguments why the OS sucks, from a bone-headed approach to library version control, to ugly API's like the MFC, inconsistent handling of kernel mechanisms/calls, a still evolving/broken application install system, extension based file types, a complete lack of usable logs and diagnostic tools built into the OS, the command line is a joke... I could go on and on.

Please! Don't let me stop you...

But please, don't give the windows guys a swiss cheese argument... there are some smart ones out there, if we want to point and laugh we need to go at them with facts :)

I personally don't think that pointing out the Registry as a big, steaming pile of Windows vulnerability is anything like "swiss cheese", and neither do these people.

Read the print version of the article in one page:
http://www.infoworld.com/print/161969

That's all true, but the Office Web Apps fall short, too, for most of the same reasons.

This is tired old FUD that you Microsoft shills trot out all the time.

Can you name one technology that Microsoft innovated? And by the way, it doesn't count if they bought it from someone else.

Ok, now to your original question:
1. Alchemy
2. Bespin
3. Bitcoin
4. eyeOS
5. KDE Social Desktop
6. Ksplice
7. Unity
8. HTTP, the Web, TCP/IP, and ARPAnet
9. X Windows
10. Perl
11. Slashdot
12. Google keeps playing with open source, but can't make up their minds. Here are some
13. Microsoft plays with open source, here are some. This must just eat you up. Too bad, Open Source is everywhere.
14. Here are some more innovative open source projects.

Now, I expect you to provide at least 5 innovative projects Microsoft created within the last 10 years. (Sorry, you can't count Windows or Office, since those ideas are much older, and are no longer considered innovative.)

Failing that, at least read what I wrote.

This is tired old FUD that you Microsoft shills trot out all the time.

Can you name one technology that Microsoft innovated? And by the way, it doesn't count if they bought it from someone else.

Ok, now to your original question:
1. Alchemy
2. Bespin
3. Bitcoin
4. eyeOS
5. KDE Social Desktop
6. Ksplice
7. Unity
8. HTTP, the Web, TCP/IP, and ARPAnet
9. X Windows
10. Perl
11. Slashdot
12. Google keeps playing with open source, but can't make up their minds. Here are some
13. Microsoft plays with open source, here are some. This must just eat you up. Too bad, Open Source is everywhere.
14. Here are some more innovative open source projects.

Now, I expect you to provide at least 5 innovative projects Microsoft created within the last 10 years. (Sorry, you can't count Windows or Office, since those ideas are much older, and are no longer considered innovative.)

Failing that, at least read what I wrote.

This is tired old FUD that you Microsoft shills trot out all the time.

Can you name one technology that Microsoft innovated? And by the way, it doesn't count if they bought it from someone else.

Ok, now to your original question:
1. Alchemy
2. Bespin
3. Bitcoin
4. eyeOS
5. KDE Social Desktop
6. Ksplice
7. Unity
8. HTTP, the Web, TCP/IP, and ARPAnet
9. X Windows
10. Perl
11. Slashdot
12. Google keeps playing with open source, but can't make up their minds. Here are some
13. Microsoft plays with open source, here are some. This must just eat you up. Too bad, Open Source is everywhere.
14. Here are some more innovative open source projects.

Now, I expect you to provide at least 5 innovative projects Microsoft created within the last 10 years. (Sorry, you can't count Windows or Office, since those ideas are much older, and are no longer considered innovative.)

Failing that, at least read what I wrote.

One page print version

It should be kept in mind that this review is from an author given to overstated screeds -- so take with a grain (or a saltshaker) of salt. This is an author who knows how to write things that will be reposted.

CLI is best for admin work, a few scripts and you've semi-automated most of the admin work. Compare that to the click here-and-here-and-here method. That's why it takes less staff to admin a Linux service than a Win er .. GUI one. Even on the desktop, BASH and a few scripts achieves more in a few seconds than minutes of clicking ...

"Armed with printouts of the spreadsheet, the .. admins sit down .. and painstakingly go through each record .. one by one, typing in each address manually for each record .. It takes several hours at least -- and unbeknownst to them, they've managed to fat-finger a few addresses and swap a digit here or there in the blear of a late Friday night"

"Meanwhile, an admin over at CLI Inc takes the two address columns from the spreadsheet, copies them to a clipboard, and pastes them into a file on a Linux box. It's the work of 10 seconds to parse that into a usable sed script" link

In many cases, you can simply select the print link and view the entire article at once. In this case the print button takes you to the url http://www.infoworld.com/print/153837

http://www.infoworld.com/print/153837

http://www.infoworld.com/print/153837

Oh boy! An article from InfoWorld.

Let me just click the print button and watch the karma pour in.

http://infoworld.com/print/154011

Single page link...

http://www.infoworld.com/print/152843

The insuperable barrier for many of us towards all handheld devices is the size of the keyboard. For serious work they just won't do.

  I publish books and offer typesetting/indexing sevices on my two websites, http://wexfordpress.com and http://wexfordpress.net. Yes I offer e-books and no I don't use Slashdot. My non-fiction offerings include only pdf e-books. Just as I won't use a crppled keyboard I won't offer books in a crippled format. I suppose both
the teeny keyboards and the dumbed down formats (Epub and Kindle) are signs of the times. Frankly I would rather offer an html file for pay on one of my websites. When Slashdot or similar sites will take html as input I might be interested.

John Culleton
wexfordpress.net

Despite your five digit UID, I don't believe you frequent Slashdot enough to have missed Don't reboot UNIX boxes.

Mr. Beard is going to ensure your server remains online and connected without disrupting the workflow at your company. He's going to unload modules, install patches, reload them. He's going to do a few hours of real work but for the rest of the month (or year if he's worth his salt) Beardo is going to be warming a seat and making sure everything is perfectly running because he knows his stuff. He earned it unlike some guy who got the job from his frat brother because he knows Linux and reinstalls everything if they get "shpchp 0000:00:01.0: Cannot reserve MMIO region" upon booting up for the first time.

Single page link...

http://www.infoworld.com/print/152843

I wish they'd link to the print page: http://infoworld.com/print/151021

At least this way you avoid the obnoxious SIX pages layout for what could fit in a single page easily. I know, I know... The submitter is always an InfoWorld employee and /. editors don't know the meaning of the word "edit", but hey, I can still ask? Beg, maybe?

You're supposed to be working. Not doing political stuff.

All while the bosses spend their time surfing for porn?

Productivity-wise, the internet is a double edged sword. We know this to be true. But if the cost of a few minutes of work unrelated political browsing means someone can do a better job with the resources on the world wide web, then it's a good trade off.

Even though that's the case (and I'm actually surprised the number isn't higher, considering my own experiences), the real revealing thing about this is that the VAST majority of IT professionals are professional enough not to take advantage of this or to retaliate against former employers. With the exception of a few high profile cases, almost all IT workers do not use these backdoors for sabotage, theft, etc.

I'd have to agree with this. I'm really surprised that the number isn't higher. I guess it depends on how diverse of a group they're including in the over arching term "IT professionals". I'd guess that if we were limiting ourselves to server/network administrators the number would be much much higher. Personally, I have not tried, but I'd put any amount of money someone wanted to wager on my being able to gain the highest level access available at my previous employment in a matter of minutes.

This is simply from the fact that I know the architecture of the network in detail, as well as the attitude towards security.

Even though that's the case (and I'm actually surprised the number isn't higher, considering my own experiences), the real revealing thing about this is that the VAST majority of IT professionals are professional enough not to take advantage of this or to retaliate against former employers. With the exception of a few high profile cases, almost all IT workers do not use these backdoors for sabotage, theft, etc.

(Read the print version of the article on one page. It's one of those "short article spread across many ad-heavy pages" crap sites.)

The article just compares the feature lists. It's not clear if either is better from a bug standpoint. A big problem with OpenOffice is that it tends to crash too much. (Especially, for some reason, when exiting.) Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

It's encouraging that LibreOffice is around. I've been using OpenOffice since 1.0, and haven't used a version of Microsoft Word later than Word 97. OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.

Here's the print version (all one one page instead of four). There's still ads, but it's better.
Also, frist psto?

8) Website devs who force simple articles to split unnecessarily across multiple webpages. They're in it for clicks and ad revenue, essentially scamming multiple banner-ad buyers into paying for the same article read. Here's an example.

Those website devs aren't hackers, they're just hacks.

8) Website devs who force simple articles to split unnecessarily across multiple webpages. They're in it for clicks and ad revenue, essentially scamming multiple banner-ad buyers into paying for the same article read. Here's an example.

You've already ticked me off by wasting my time.
Link to the print version next time: http://www.infoworld.com/print/151276

I prefer my password. It's just a PITA that changes daily. alias s='sudo -i'
Same result as "su -" but with less typing.

Yes, root's password was set / changed. It's insanely long. I like it that way.

PS: this /. interface sucks now :wq

http://www.infoworld.com/print/151016 "You're welcome." --Nick Burns

Are they just going to translate Dalvik bytecode back to Java bytecode, and run Android applications that way?

It would have to be something like that, though I doubt it will be on-the-fly. And Android isn't just Dalvik, it has its own set of APIs and a core Linux kernel as well. I posted some thoughts on this a couple weeks back over at InfoWorld.

What *new features* ended up in Windows 7 that happend to already exist in OSX:

Jump lists: Dock menus
Aero Peek: Exposé
File previews
Gadgets: Widgets
Sticky Notes: Stickies
Saved searches: Smart folders
Network shares automatically appearing in left sidebar
RSS feeds
Windows Disc Image Burner: Disk Utility
Taskbar makeover: Dock look and feel

http://www.infoworld.com/d/mac/top-10-features-microsoft-stole-mac-os-x-971&current=2&last=11#slideshowTop

55% growth in revenue for the Entertainment & Devices Division, as the success of the Kinect sensor boosted sales of Xbox 360 consoles, Xbox Live subscriptions and Xbox games.

A Christmas launch sure helps, but how long will it last?

Office 2010 is the fastest-selling consumer version of Office in history, with license sales over 50% ahead of Office 2007 over an equivalent period following launch.

Hmmm, sort of. If you RTFA you will see that " "Office Deferral" refers to copies of Office 2007 sold at the end of 2009 with guaranteed free upgrades to Office 2010. Half of the consumer revenue increase is due to an accounting technique that shifted items sold in 2009 (viz, Office 2007 with an upgrade guarantee) to income in 2010." and that " reflecting licensing of the 2010 Microsoft Office system to transactional business customers [which is to say, one-time sales]" .

Also FTFA " If you take out the spike and the deferral, quarterly Windows revenues were up 3 percent year-to-year. If you include the deferral but ignore the spike, you see a 5 percent decrease in Windows revenue year-to-year. And if you include the deferral and the spike, Windows sales were down a whopping 30 percent compared to last year."

In conclusion, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Accountants' jobs are to pull such numbers from their asses that make the balance sheet look good for investors.

Your question stumped me, so I asked the experts. It turns out that it *is* possible to disable NTLM in Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 with the "Restrict NTLM" option. But my expert pointed out that enabling this option isn't sufficient to fix pass-the-hash attacks. It turns out that pass-the-hash attacks (or rather pass-the-tgt attacks) also can work against Kerberos, it's just that there aren't any tools available to mount them. But the attack works.

Digging in deeper, the only reason Windows is considered vulnerable to pass-the-hash is that Windows is the only major OS where tools to automate pass-the-hash attacks are available. Every major OS out there is vulnerable to pass-the-hash attacks, the issue isn't unique to Microsoft (and thus the existance of pass-the-hash attacks not because 'microsoft developers are clueless').

One other thought: pass-the-hash attacks require that the local user be an administrator. If you want to defeat pass-the-hash attacks, don't allow your users to be local administrators. Microsoft's best practices have strongly recommended that users not run as administrators since well before Windows 2000. And to preempt your next question: you're right, Microsoft only made it possible for users to run as non-admins in Windows XP and even then it was challenging. It wasn't until Windows Vista that they enabled something that resembled standard-users as the default (which in turn forced software developers to change their applications so that they'll run as standard users).

http://www.infoworld.com/148576

There's no such thing as non-network locked phones in Japan,

Assuming you are right (can't verify) can't you buy a smart-phone from overseas with a mini-USB port? Even the first version of HTC Desire have had one.

... so there's no such thing as just simply "picking a carrier".

And what, are there no longer Mobile-Internet dongles (data only) in Japan? Did the Japanase economy go down so badly from 2006?

The TFA says it's better because it uses visible light rather than magnetic radio waves. It doesn't give any reasons why thats better.

Because it doesn't require special shielding to prevent snooping from outside the room.
Each iteration of Wifi encryption is inevitably shown to be too weak.

Transmitting the data through the air, you mean like WiFi and cell phones do all the time? Too bad we don't have a way to scramble the data in a way that makes its contents inaccessible unless someone has the "key"...

I assume you're suggesting they secure the data transmitted through the air scrambled with proven commercial protections like WEP, WPA-PSK, or were you thinking they might secure it with a product more widely used, like GSM?

Last month when I read the article about their system, they claimed it was a "highly secure solution." But they did did not reveal any technical details that said "we're using protocol x with algorithm y to secure communications." So for now, we know only that they claim their system is highly secure, but they've given us no basis for that claim.

1. Windows XP still has more market share (57%) than Windows Vista (12%) and Windows 7 (21%) combined. More to the point since Vista and XP are affected, more than three quarters of Windows systems are affected. They should care. We sure as hell care. If all Microsoft cares about is W7, that tells us a lot about their commitment to support and security. It's not 2002 any more. It's now 2011, and if being "all in" in the cloud and "all in" in mobile, and committed to "Dynamics" (whatever the heck that was) has distracted from their commitment to security, then we need to know because WE USE THEIR SOFTWARE for more than a year or two.

2. Windows is a brand. A label. A blank symbol. It's not, and never was an operating system. It has been an operating environment for some time, or as some would say, several. It doesn't, and can't, "give a flying fuck" about anything. Windows is a brand that's owned by a legal fiction, a "corporate person". Since there is some fictional personhood attached to the legal entity Microsoft, and some history, we may be able to ascribe some motivation to that with the understanding that anthropomorphizing soulless corporations is in itself a trap. Some here would probably say that Microsoft is the cruel bargainer the devil himself hopes to be someday, but at least we're agreed that it has some personification to hang motivations on. Please don't say "Windows" when you mean "Microsoft" it confuses many issues. They also make very good mice. Ok, they don't actually make the mice, but you should get my drift.

And yeah if it drives adoption of their new product off of their old product without too much escape to actually good product as a goal, we'd all have thunk it. Because that's what they do. The prevention of actual progress is their goal.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/tech-industry-analysis/when-comcast-bullies-netflix-the-internet-loses-339

You want to change your story?

The title of the article is "2010's best tales from the tech trenches". Each tale that's mentioned in the article has a link. If you click on the link, you get more information. For example, in the story that you mentioned, the full article is "User ignorance wreaks havoc on company's computer files". If you read the full article it clearly explains what happened. I suppose you could say that Infoworld sucks at pull quotes but all the information was there, one click away.

http://www.infoworld.com/print/146869

Because there's really no reason to post that shit on two pages to cram in more ads.

"They are also a quarter of the speed."

Apparently you are talking about clock speed, but 2 GHz or 2.5 GHz is not slow compared to the Intel Atom. The speeds are equivalent.

http://www.infoworld.com/print/146578 ... :)