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Yes, the kid chip is being marketed via fear mongering
for their kids already.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2176543,00.asp

It will get worse too, and they have started putting the
RFID tags on medical implants as well.

http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/3978/1/1/

I expect phones, watches, and other devices will have them
with or without us knowing about it as well.

They will simply hide the devices.

Not very hard as small as they are getting.

http://www.i4u.com/article5046.html

I'd say you may not like the idea of being tagged,
but odds are they are thinking a stealth tagging method.

Only ppl that will use a active scanner to
find them on themselves will have any luck.

Not bad, but a little expensive. According to this, the battery lasts a week and has it's own wall wart. I suppose you could charge it up at night, like you do your cell phone and the limited display area is responsible for that good battery life.

Do you get a lot of use out of it without a matching earbud? My first thought was, "If I get a call I actually want to deal with, I'm going to have to pull the phone out anyway." An earbud would take care of that problem but that adds even more to the $400 cost of the watch. Was the $400 worth it to begin with?

Can you make it work with a Neo1973? The device is capable of much more than Sony gave it. It could do everything the Spot does and more if it would really talk to a smart phone. The Neo1973 also takes care of privacy issues - I'd never put my contact information into a non free phone hooked up to companies that are asking for immunity to wiretapping crimes.

'They sent the workers an e-mail about a plan to cut their benefits and included a link to a Web site where they could find out more'

'When employees clicked on the link, they were directed to a Web server set up by Winkler and his team. The employees' machines displayed an error message, but the server downloaded malware that enabled the team to take command of the machines.

"Then we had full system control," Winkler says.

"It was effective within minutes."'

Any guess as to which Operating System this malware runs on ..

Casio sells waterproof phones in the US: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2034585,00.asp

Verizon's had a waterproof phone for a while (article dated 10/2/06), called the G'zOne--my dad's got one and he's dropped it in the ocean a few times. It's the real deal.

(I suppose, ultimately, for power consumption purposes, you'll never have a projector built in, because it would take too much energy to run, but I can dream, right?)

Never is a really long time...advances in battery capability (or the replacement of what we call a battery by some other power source) coupled with advances in projector technology (ie http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2242734,00.asp ) may make this possible, perhaps sooner rather than later.

If they keep making decisions like this (pushing Safari as an iTunes update), then they are sure to join the hated ranks of Microsoft soon.

When are we going to get the articles highlighting the benefits of SP1 here on /.? The positive comments posted as 'articles'? I've installed it on 3 machines already and it certainly has improved the system a lot, it feels far more responsive and I didn't have any problems during the install either. By browsing the comments on the previous SP1 'story' (some negative blog comments) here on SlashDot I am not alone in this. Looking around the web I can find many having a similar positive experience with SP1 yet /. continues to fail to report this.

There's an easy solution: A grace period. Let the kernel developers know (done), let the kernel developers fix their kernels (done), and give time for such fixed kernels to spread. Change the compiler so that it won't generate the "unnecessary" code, but DISABLE that by default for a while. After a long time (two years? More?), switch to enable-by-default. This change has no useful upside for users, and lots of downsides (in terms of broken programs), so there's no reason to hurry it. It's fine to do it, but just do it slowly.

Vista complaints have nothing to do with "too much backwards compatibility"; one of the key Vista problems is a LACK of adequate backwards compatibility: http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_Software_Compatibility_List#Heavy_Problems.2C_Currently_Incompatible http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2104022,00.asp

The only reason to run Windows (any version) is to be able to use the hardware and software that is only compatible with Windows. I know of no one who claims that Windows is the "best operating system on Earth", by any measure; people choose Windows for application compatibility, not for its "innovation". A "grossly incompatible Windows" is completely worthless.

Similarly, even if it's in the spec, it's absurd to change a system and make it so user programs just break. Think of the users. Instead, figure out how to make the change WITHOUT harming the users. That user might be you.

Hmmmmm... I wonder why that may be?

Or a better question, why would Ferrari license their trademark out to be slapped on something that any reasonable person could tell is a piece of crap just by looking at it. Seriously who needs a VGA, and a PS/2 port on their laptop nowadays? What year is this, 1998? And for $1860? Unless you really need the dedicated video to play games on a 12" screen, I don't see much reason to buy this one.

As for the case. Who needs carbon fiber on their laptop? Its use obviously didn't save any weight. The case weighs 4.4 lbs. You can also tell it uses cheap plastic that will discolor or crack easily. If I'm paying $1900 for a laptop, it better at least look and feel like a $1900 laptop (see a Lenovo Thinkpad or MacBook Pro). Ferrari has come a long way since the days when they were associated with flashy but brittle cars. I don't think it's in their best interest to rekindle that memory by putting their name on flashy yet brittle laptops.

I never saw HD players hit $99 anywhere.

It did happen.

which is another manipulation in order to gain marketshare.

Right, and those manipulations can go away as soon as the war is over. Had it continued, would they have raised prices much? I suspect they'd have tried to keep prices stable as the technology got cheaper, until they eventually made a profit.

When you have to buy extra parts for your widget to work, and when parts for competing widgets are incompatible, you end up with what are essentially mini-monopolies.

What you're missing is that they are still essentially mini-monopolies. Competing formats are nowhere near as good as a single, open format, but they are better than a single closed format. (Among closed formats, a less-DRM'd, region-free version is better, too.)

Point about some studios doing both was, had the war gone on much longer, other studios might've been forced to follow suit. What you'd eventually end up with is, consumers buy the player and disc format they like best, and in another year or two, we'd have players that play both formats anyway. Of course, all that is pure speculation...

There were 1.7 million sold in the United States in 2006. These are bought by people that just want to show some pictures they took with their digital camera without having to dedicate a computer to the job. Black Friday was loaded with ads for picture frames for around $70. Given the price point, it was an attractive Christmas gift to give to anyone who may not be computer savvy. PC Magazine is predicting that these digital frames will become smarter to give non-computer users more capability like Video streams and tablet PC functionality. The virus problem could become much larger as we get more and more devices that are preloaded with "easy to use" software.

Off-topic I know, but surely the obvious headline for the article seen at the top of this image was "Weepublican or Democrap" given the subject matter?

Every 2-bit nerd thinks he knows what's best for Microsoft, why should Microsoft listen to him? Because he has a blog and people read his blog?

He is not just some guy with a blog. He is Lance Ulanoff, Editor in Chief of PC Magazine.

You're one of those people who say "Unsolicited Bulk Email" rather than "spam" right???

bandwidth -- definition

The transmission capacity of an electronic pathway such as a communications line, computer bus or computer channel. In a digital line, it is measured in bits per second or bytes per second (see Mb/sec). In an analog channel or in a digital channel that is wrapped in a carrier frequency, bandwidth is the difference between the highest and lowest frequencies and is measured in Hertz (kHz, MHz, GHz).

Here's the Wikipedia definition that says roughly the same thing.

In computer networking literature, digital bandwidth refers to data rate measured in bit/s, for example channel capacity (digital bandwidth capacity) or throughput (digital bandwidth consumption). The reason for this usage is that the channel capacity in bit/s is proportional to the analogue bandwidth in hertz according to Hartley's law.

The OLPC has already driven development for a number of other ultra-cheap computers, which is not a bad thing.

I disagree. There is already a huge envionmental problem with dumping electronics. I support the OLPC because I believe in education and helping third world children. However, having cheap computers in first world countries can be an environmental nightmare.

I would agree with you if these machines were recycled completely. However, used electronics are being exported to countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are less strict or non-existent. Once there, they waste many of the resources, and poison the environment.

Nokia 1100 does.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1944859,00.asp

I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room.

This might interest you, then.

For a better looking monitor from Dell, try this one http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2243334,00.asp

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=222480&s=27845&a=222482&po=2,00.asp The article gives its resolution as 848x480, which is on par with most consumer model projectors. I don't know what the refresh rate is, but the image in the photo looks perfectly watchable. It's quite possible that it'll be flicker-riffic and headache inducing, but as far as image quality goes, it looks fine.

I am even more surprised that the only reader review for the article, says only good stuff about the computer, but at the same time it gives EVEN WORSE RATING (1 vs editors' 1.5): http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2227810,00.asp#member_rating

Is it reader's oversight, or who assigned or changed the rating then...

That's not true. I own the PC Magazine issue, from just a few months ago, where they reviewed the MacBook Pro and gave it thier Editor's Choice award for best mainstream laptop. It is why I just bought one.

Is it not that hard to imagine that WalMart sold a piece of crap computer with Linux pre-loaded to keep the costs down.

This is the same useless periodical that continually gives Nortron Internet Security a 4 or 5 star rating year after year. Enough said.

Here's the reliablity survey:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2184105,00.asp

... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine, which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

I thought it was intentional humor. Trying to buy a vowel on Jeopardy would make as much sense as some of John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine columns.

BTW, I always refer to him as "John C. Dvorak" as h puts his name on the byline, because there's a John A. Dvorak out there who's a respectable journalist and he shouldn't have to pay for this guy's mess.

Also, I can't help but wonder if this will stick to the course of The Dvorak Effect. There's a strong history, supposedly (I've never checked the actual rates) that if John C. Dvorak praises something in a big way it nearly always fails and that if he pans something it nearly always succeeds. I wonder if it's been brought to his attention, and I sometimes wonder if he makes his column decisions consciously with that in mind.

Anyone can look at PC Magazine's back articles by JCD to see his rate of success and his cocky writing style. The archive only goes back to 2001, though, and your local library might have back into the 90's.

Someone mentioned the phrase "the diamond age", which reminds me that just recently I re-read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age . Like that book, I'm sure that some people would like to believe and hope that OLPC becomes some sort of real-world manifestation of The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, educating children that otherwise wouldn't ever have a chance to get any sort of meaningful education, thus elevating them and unbinding them from what would otherwise be a life of very little meaning and potential. Unfortunately there are, and always have been, too many people in the world that understand that knowledge is power, and that in order to control the masses, one must stifle education and limit the flow of information; educated peasants are usually not very obedient peasants because they know they have other options.

I hope I'm wrong about all this. Only time will tell.

Brick-and-mortar "real" companies such as Sprint have endless and mostly meaningless meetings about minutia such as logo dimensions. Should the "S" in Sprint be kerned tighter to accommodate the column width in a proposed advertisement in the New Yorker? Would that be a violation of the "don't edit the logo" rules established by a committee some years back? This will be followed by a meeting as to whether they should dissolve the "don't edit the logo" committee. In that meeting it will be discovered that nobody even knows who is on the "don't edit the logo" committee, and all evidence indicates there never was any committee in the first place--just some manager in the marketing department who put the rule in place. It will be discovered further that the only reason she put the rule in place was because that's what someone else did in the company where she worked before as a secretary. This rigmarole will take up most of a day. The next day will consist of meetings regarding unauthorized modifications to the Google-Sprint letterhead and whether or not the executive correspondence paper should be standardized as 12-pound ivory laid or plain cotton rag. The brightness factor of the paper will call for a second meeting.

To find out that Leopard is not Vista, read this stellar review by.....PC Magazine.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2207543,00.asp

Vista is a bear, and Leopard is the cub? Sounds more like John C. Dvorak is the bear, and this guy is his cub.

Reblogged from http://drupal.geek.nz/node/48;

Oliver Rist 'reviewed' Mac OS X Leopard and his article was slashdotted.

Disclaimer

I'm writing this on my second MacBook Pro, in our house we also have MacBook white (My fiancee's), an iPod Shuffle, an Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express with Airtunes. Although I wouldn't agree with you, it wouldn't surprise me if you took me for a JAFAF (Just Another Fucking Apple Fanboy). However I make an effort to keep a realistic view on Apple's products and if I felt that an open source operating system could enhance my workflow as much (or nearly as much) as Mac OS X, I would switch, but currently there isn't. I work on FLOSS all day every day -- that's my job, as a web and drupal developer and consultant.

Response

Oliver is clearly having a bitch in this article, and no doubt intentionally to aggravate JAFAFs and motivate discussion responses and click-throughs on the ads. Hence I won't give him or PC mag the pleasure of a long detailed approach, but merely attempt sieve out the parts inspired by T.O.M., and add my own $0.2; a realistic count of my Leopard experience to date.

"Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest"

This is clearly a premenstrual hyperbole, proven by;

"A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times."

Back in the day when I ran pretend operating systems like those from that scummy vendor in a place near Seattle. The crappy thing crashed at least daily. That would be 'crash-happy'. Not you're slightly-more-than-weekly.

I guesstimate that Leopard has crashed or frozen about 8 to 12 times in the last 5 weeks since I installed it on October 26. Given the weight of use and the limits I take Leopard to, I consider this edging on acceptable, definitely not enough to go back to Tiger. Most of these times I got apple's designer-screen-of-death .

However, all of the applications I used on Tiger, also work on Leopard, and almost all without a glitch. (I don't count Apple's Safari 2, as this has clearly been disabled in Leopard at the call of management at apple and I'm confident that there's no technical reason why it couldn't run on Leopard.)

I repeat; All the applications I used on Tiger work on Leopard.

Komodo IDE had a few issues initially, but Komodo's update has smoothed that out. Parallels on Leopard needs some serious love. I believe it's the cause of at least half of the crashes. I think Skype, or the combination of skype with a bluetooth headset or bluetooth stereo headphones is another combination causing crashes and freezes.

I'd like to emphasize how impressive this is. Take a look at my dock; http://drupal.geek.nz/files/my%20dock.png

I use all but two of these applications daily;

1. Finder
2. Yummy FTP
3. iTerm
4. MAMP
5. Komodo IDE
6. TextMate
7. Stickies
8. TaskCoach
9. Netscape Navigator
10. Firefox 2
11. Firefox 3 beta 1
12. Adum
13. Xmeeting
14. Skype
15. iTunes
16. Activity Monitor

Reblogged from http://drupal.geek.nz/node/48;

Oliver Rist 'reviewed' Mac OS X Leopard and his article was slashdotted.

Disclaimer

I'm writing this on my second MacBook Pro, in our house we also have MacBook white (My fiancee's), an iPod Shuffle, an Airport Extreme base station and an Airport Express with Airtunes. Although I wouldn't agree with you, it wouldn't surprise me if you took me for a JAFAF (Just Another Fucking Apple Fanboy). However I make an effort to keep a realistic view on Apple's products and if I felt that an open source operating system could enhance my workflow as much (or nearly as much) as Mac OS X, I would switch, but currently there isn't. I work on FLOSS all day every day -- that's my job, as a web and drupal developer and consultant.

Response

Oliver is clearly having a bitch in this article, and no doubt intentionally to aggravate JAFAFs and motivate discussion responses and click-throughs on the ads. Hence I won't give him or PC mag the pleasure of a long detailed approach, but merely attempt sieve out the parts inspired by T.O.M., and add my own $0.2; a realistic count of my Leopard experience to date.

"Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest"

This is clearly a premenstrual hyperbole, proven by;

"A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times."

Back in the day when I ran pretend operating systems like those from that scummy vendor in a place near Seattle. The crappy thing crashed at least daily. That would be 'crash-happy'. Not you're slightly-more-than-weekly.

I guesstimate that Leopard has crashed or frozen about 8 to 12 times in the last 5 weeks since I installed it on October 26. Given the weight of use and the limits I take Leopard to, I consider this edging on acceptable, definitely not enough to go back to Tiger. Most of these times I got apple's designer-screen-of-death .

However, all of the applications I used on Tiger, also work on Leopard, and almost all without a glitch. (I don't count Apple's Safari 2, as this has clearly been disabled in Leopard at the call of management at apple and I'm confident that there's no technical reason why it couldn't run on Leopard.)

I repeat; All the applications I used on Tiger work on Leopard.

Komodo IDE had a few issues initially, but Komodo's update has smoothed that out. Parallels on Leopard needs some serious love. I believe it's the cause of at least half of the crashes. I think Skype, or the combination of skype with a bluetooth headset or bluetooth stereo headphones is another combination causing crashes and freezes.

I'd like to emphasize how impressive this is. Take a look at my dock; http://drupal.geek.nz/files/my%20dock.png

I use all but two of these applications daily;

1. Finder
2. Yummy FTP
3. iTerm
4. MAMP
5. Komodo IDE
6. TextMate
7. Stickies
8. TaskCoach
9. Netscape Navigator
10. Firefox 2
11. Firefox 3 beta 1
12. Adum
13. Xmeeting
14. Skype
15. iTunes
16. Activity Monitor

Do you mean actually 'Running' using Leopard, or 'fuddle along until it crashes' using Leopard?

"Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223921,00.asp

Dvorak: That's right. I'm using a Mac, and, surprise, I like it. Deal.

This article might be more to your taste, then.

The fact that somebody on slashdot has tagged this "haha" is a new low for slashdot. Considering Apple does NOTHING to prevent you from hacking this software and putting it on a PC, the "haha" tag is completely stupid. Apple engineers are busy making the most polished OS on the planet http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2207556,00.asp?sr=hotnews and waste no resources preventing the less than 1% of geeks out there from hacking it to work on a PC.

.... Is available at ThinkGeek.com. This watch:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/8e18/

Is the same one listed in the PC Mag article:

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=217864&s=1562&a=217876&po=13,00.asp?p=y

So it looks like you can get at least one of these items in the US.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2204615,00.asp

the Internet is media, yes, but it is NOT Hollywood. Hollywood does not have a hold on the term entertainment, and they aren't the only players in "entertainment media".

Here's a good article about it by /.'s favorite John Dvorak.

and commented on by Dvorak. (God, did I just say that he confirmed anything!?!)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2188281,00.asp

Also, the Reg noticed - after my Slashdot posting, for once - so they are chasing this tail!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/01/google_spam_infiltration/

Wheee!

Too bad for Jobs that it is legal to unlock your iPhone to use it with a different carrier.

"Q: What is the most common, preventable security hole you've seen?
A: Aside from users, I'd have to say updates. Users always ignore messages about updating software..."

I always thought that was funny, and wondered if anyone else caught the quip... more here: http://jaclynperrelli.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/beyond-modifications-to-the-infrastructure-a-hacker-interview/

Third page of the article, about halfway down, via macrumors.com. Have you seen evidence that you can edit the calendar, or are you assuming based on the iPhone?

After a lot of scouting around just to have anything that works to do minimally invasive net content filtering for a reasonable cost, I came up with the Linksys WRT54GS router (review) and their Parental Controls service. Not by any means perfect, but most of the time, it does the job and works on ALL the connected computers, you just define different users. It is not ideal for households where everyone shares the same computer. What it's best at is cutting off services at certain times of day. You can configure the filtering and then largely set and forget it, although you need to err on the lax side unless you always want to be overriding the controls. For whatever reason, Linksys doesn't really advertise this service very much, despite being one of the more cost effective options out there. For this reason, I am always thinking that they are going to discontinue the service, but they haven't (and I've had it for a couple of years now). The fact that it is administrated through the router is a big plus, comparable to corporate solutions costing much, much more.

That may not help, depending on the sophistication of the keylogging software. Here's an interesting article I found on the subject... http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=18129 0,00.asp

Using something like Password Safe (http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net) on a USB key would be helpful, as it gives you the option to copy individual usernames & passwords without even viewing them.

No reasonable person can still blame the user for M$'s sorry security [...] Windoze system flaws are so pervasive that choice of browser, firewalls and the like can only delay the result.

Thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people got infected by the latest Storm Worm. Their machines are now part of a botnet. This worm requires a considerable amount of user action and it infects only unpatched machines. Tell me again how this is Microsoft's fault, please. Tell me again how all of these worms and trojans that require an inordinate amount of user action are Microsoft's fault. Explain to me how Joe Windows getting infected with an executable inside a password-protected ZIP file is Microsoft's fault.

When you're done with that, explain to me how it is possible for people not to get infected by anything if your claims that it's impossible to run Windows securely are true. Because otherwise 100% of all "Windoze" machines would be in a botnet, as opposed to your mythic 25%, which Macthorpe pretty much debunked (for the 42nd time in a row).

Really looking forward to that, though as usual you'll probably just pretend no one replied to you, because once you leave your soundbyte bullet point FUD security blanket, you are completely lost for arguments, like all zealots.

You are truly deranged, you aren't really and you know you're lying, or you're paid to blabber all these stupidities on the internets. Which is it?

Next thing you know, Dvorak will come out with a sensible and non-stupid article on Macs, and at that point I drop technology altogether and start farming for a living.

Might be time for you to head down to the farm supply store! ;-)