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"Unlimited space with several accounts." (Emphasis added.)

By my count, a few thousand accounts should do the trick. Maybe this guy could help you set them up: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/201252/hacker-takes-50-000-a-few-cents-at-a-time

Caption of figure 2 reads:

One Travel Bug has spanned from Cornwall to Scotland - via Germany

and the screenshot shows a clearly labeled map where all waypoints are in Britain or the Netherlands.

Leaving ethical implications of piracy aside, I'm just curious whether you're sure your BT connections are encrypted. Many clients offer encryption for the purpose of circumventing traffic shaping procedures used by some ISPs, but are very adamant that this encryption does NOT provide any assurance in skirting the law. As far as I am aware, no client offers true endpoint-to-endpoint encryption, but even if they did offer it, most clients choose low-strength ciphers like RS4, because using the stronger AES cipher requires a lot more CPU cycles for both the handshake (which must be done with every peer you connect to), as well as the actual encryption of the sent data.

While encryption does make it harder to detect that the traffic crossing ISPs networks is in fact BT-related, it's not impossible for them to crack it. Also, being that circumstancial evidence, or simple blackmail, has worked for the RIAA thus far, I wouldn't be willing to chance it.

Were I to be interested in torrenting some content in a less-than-legal manner, I would ensure that I remained low on the RIAA (and others') priority lists by:
1) not downloading anything that is immensely popular (i.e. selling well) right now, or hasn't been released yet
2) encrypting as much of everything as possible in the event that the connections generated by me do catch someone's eye
3) not piss off your ISP by torrenting to your max bandwidth during peak hours (most clients have a download-scheduling preference pane that will allow you to restrict, or eliminate, downloading during these peak hours http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/01/08/sunday-evening-the-new-web-rush-hour/ ). PS, if anyone has found any good, concrete data on when peak internet usage is, i'd love to see it :)
4) use a blocklist (some people like 'em, some people hate 'em). there's not much concrete data on whether they really help, but it helps me feel better. some clients (like Transmission) have built-in ones

And of course, feel free to correct/discuss any of this.

The department continues to believe that a properly structured settlement agreement in this case offers the potential for important societal benefits. The department stated that it is committed to continuing to work with the parties and other stakeholders to help develop solutions through which copyright holders could allow for digital use of their works by Google and others, whether through legislative or market-based activities.

Seemed to me they weren't happy with Google 'ownership' of orphaned works and the fact that it's "opt out" not "opt in" for authors. I guess you could see that as opposition but basically the amended contract failed to satisfy them. That's why they're having a hearing on Feb. 18, 2010.

A deal this big is bound to have lengthy negotiations and investigations as it's truly game changing for everyone involved and the world at large.

As a MSFTie, I have to agree, unfortunately. This kind of idiot drivel is precisely what earns us so much bad rep that, no matter how hard engineers try to do their best, they can't overcome the public image which worsens every time one of the brass opens his fucking mouth. This here reminds me of that other moron, the one who launched MSN Mobile Music, and was so damn proud about one of the worst DRM schemes on the market. I mean, what the fuck? You don't literally tell your customers that you're going to make them suck up it all the way and pay for it, and then go ahead and advise to enjoy the taste while it lasts! Not when all two people who were even bothering to listen to your drivel will just shrug, tell you to fuck off, and go to iTMS instead.

lol

Get with the times man.

and there's no evidence to suggest that the flaw exists in IE 7 or 8

You need to visit /. more frequently. On today's frontpage you may find this submission, which references this article, which contains this sentence:

But although Internet Explorer 6 has been the source of attacks until now, Microsoft's advisory admits that both IE7 and IE8 are vulnerable to the same flaw, even on Windows 7.

GP is confused due to this sort of news. Parent is correct in that there will be no such interface.

What I don't get is the choice of BOTH OSes on this thing. If you read the specs this thing is maxed out at 1Gb, which makes it a poor choice for Windows 7, which most reviews I've seen set 2Gb as the "sweet spot" for that OS to really perform, and Android? WTF? A mobile phone OS? Neither choice makes any sense at all. If they wanted a "quick boot" like we see in certain motherboards they should have put an embedded Linux in a ROM and went that way.

So to me this whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. Windows is being starved for RAM, and the Linux based OS is running on a platform it was never designed for, and which they apparently didn't bother to really tweak it for, although I doubt all the tweaks in the world will turn a phone OS into a Netbook OS. The only thing I can figure is some marketing genius got caught up in the buzz behind both OSes and said "Hey, if Android and Win7 have buzz, we can put out a Netbook with BOTH and get double plus buzz!" but as we have seen time and time again playing buzzword bingo usually ends up a giant can o' fail, as we can see here.

... you don't have to RTFA, but could you at least look at the pictures?

The glasses just look like sunglasses. Yeah. Sorry, but there's no Power Glove nerd points for using this tech. I mean you could argue that it's kinda nerdy to be using tinted glasses with a laptop in public, inside, but by then I think you've got to admit it's pretty nerdy to be using a laptop in public.

glasses
http://photos.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/DSC01079.jpg
powerglove
http://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/power_glove.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYBzKFm-rd0

The article links to the Sharp Actius RD3D, a 5-year-old failed 3D laptop. But, the summary calls this new one the "world's first". I suppose the article submitter didn't RTFA, and neither did the poster?

But this one isn't even coherent!

The screenshot in TFA looks nothing like the Office ribbon. The purpose of the ribbon is to make apparent the options the are usually buried within expanding hierarchical menus. In the screenshot it looks to me like they just replaced pulldown menus with pulldown buttons.

I love the Office ribbon and would be very happy to see this standard propagate into more user interfaces. I'd love to see it implemented in Firefox, but I see no such thing here.

You can now officially say Vista. Only the most vicious M$ astroturfers would blame you.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/351652/microsoft-admits-vista-was-a-less-good-product

Still, the point is valid. A 1.2 MP camera is really useless. 5 MP is pretty reasonable.

Er, no. Any camera with a lens the size of a pinhead, no flash (or a feeble LED flash) and lousy ergonomics that make it hard to hold the camera steady while pressing the shutter is useless. Adding pixels doesn't help - smaller pixels = less photons hitting each pixel = lower sensitivity = more noise and slow shutter speed = blurry and/or underexposed photos. Plus, the resulting photos are getting too big to send quickly over the mobile network.

The megapixel wars on camera phones is just dumb: much better to stick at 1-2 megapixels and crank up the sensitivity so people can take shake-free snapshots indoors.

A standard 6"x4" snapshot at 150dpi is about 0.5 megapixels.

Sigh! - kids today! Late last century I paid over £1000 for one of these and back then we were pretty happy with the 1.4 megapixel results. Of course, it had a half-decent lens.

Cloud computing is useless for the average user. Who in their right mind would wants to store everything important to them on an advanced cluster for a monthly fee?

You're assuming that a typical user doesn't have their home computer stuffed full of spy-ware, that they know how to backup everything that matters to them and that they only ever want to access their files from a single location and from a single device. Faceless-mega corporation 'in the cloud' is likely to be much better at managing that data than a typical home user. Even if privacy suffers a bit, at least it will do so in defined and publicised ways (compare and contrast with the problems of techs at the local repair shop rummaging through your data).

...I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.

That would make me a bit more tense than "Please remember to lock it."

""Despite his growing affinity for the machine, he left school at 17 to become a hairdresser, a career cut short by a friend's insistence that there was better money, and he was better suited, to a career in IT."" http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/252972/gary-mckinnon-britains-hacking-hero.html I find it highly unlikely that an Aspie would ever become a hair dresser, an incredibly social job. Anybody who has every had any kind of contact with a true Aspie knows they avoid social situations like the plague. I call shenanigans.

I'm all for competition, but previous music efforts by Microsoft have been hilariously bad. This interview is comedic gold for cluelessness. An actual Q&A with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK:

If I buy these songs on your service - and they're locked to my phone - what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?

Well, I think you know the answer to that.

Meanwhile, notes reader Barence, Asus is continuing to distance itself from Android, saying it "isn't a priority."

I think the article you wanted to link there was Asus distances itself from Android netbook.

That's odd considering the story we discussed yesterday in which Qualcomm showed an eee PC (an Asus product) running Android with an ARM processor. And in the Bloomberg article (which also mentions that), "Asustek said in February its engineers were trying to develop an Android-based netbook this year."

The comments of Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asus, don't convince me. Actions speak louder than words. Hint: When you release an ARM Processor based chipset in a netbook, you're actually distancing yourself from Windows and x86 applications.

What he means to say is "everything's ready, just don't alarm our Redmond masters until we're sure the consumer likes Android."

"Familiar - Windows is easy to use and familiar so you can be up and running right away" - with 94% market share (Mac at 5% and Linux at 1%) it is reasonable to assume that most people are familiar with the Windows environment.

I realize that exact figures don't really change your argument much but market share figures are something that have long been slippery. The more appropriate figures, in my opinion, put Windows at about 88%, Mac at 9.7 and Linux around 1%.

Market share properly refers to the number of computers sold during a given period of time, which is not necessarily a good indication of the number of computers actually in use, which is called "installed base." One reason is that the time period given may or may not be representative. For example, the Mac had almost 20% market share in the month immediately following the introduction of the original iMac in 1997. That was short lived and didn't really affect the installed base that much. Another reason is, Mac advocates contend, that Mac users keep their Macs longer than Windows users keep their PCs. Therefore, the Mac's market share translates to a higher installed base. In the case of Linux, it's really hard to tell because many copies of Linux are not sold at all. They're just downloaded and installed on as many machines as the user wants.

Market share is often cited because it's something that's easy to measure. Another method that's relatively easy to measure is the percent of web surfing observed. This can be biased because of different uses for different kinds of computers and different software configurations. For example, the inclusion of RSS feeds turned on by default in recent versions of OS X gives Apple an unfair advantage because it constantly generates multiple hits to popular sites which the user is not actually going to. On the other hand, pervasive spyware may give Windows an unfair advantage for similar reasons. Linux is underrepresented in terms of these kinds of unintended surfing. Internet share also doesn't do a very good job counting the share of Linux in the server and embedded markets since these machines aren't really used that much for web surfing. Web surfing figures are often, wrongly, published as "market share," as in this article. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at the figures.

Antivirus is excluded from the app count.

How does the operating system determine what is antivirus software? Does antivirus software have to have a Windows Logo Program signature in order not to count as an application? That would appear to exclude Free antivirus software such as ClamWin.

posted on /. a while ago. It's also up to OEM's if they offer this or or Windows 7 Home Premium. How many times will this story be posted to Slashdot? The last one was in February. Editors, surely you would have known something like this was posted before, with a better article.

Antivirus is excluded from the app count.

Sarge really was the source of these endless jokes. Almost three years, on a Linux that was considerably less mature than it is today was forever...

Sure, the release time from Woody to Sarge was funny until you realized that even with the umpteen thousands of packages included with Sarge, the Debian team still beat release times between Microsoft's bare-bones desktop OSes Windows XP and Vista.

The "specific types of hardware" mentioned in the latter quote appears to refer to netbooks. (The link is from the /. article on it.)

Even if it doesn't refer specifically to netbooks, the fact remains that the edition with the process limit is no longer the emerging markets edition, so the poster I originally replied to was still misinformed. ("You probably live in a western country - NO PROCESS LIMIT FOR YOU")

What linked article are you referring to? http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/246413/mac-os-surges-towards-10-market-share.html says that Linux has increased from 0.6% to 0.83% market-share, which is an increase of 33%. If Linux keeps that up, the market-share will be 17% in 10 years.

I wouldn't expect that situation to improve any time soon.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/245859/qa-microsoft-defends-return-to-drm.html

In a bid to win back profits after huge layoffs worldwide, Microsoft UK has launched Zune MusicTurd(tm) for mobile phones.

The highly competitive music store offers tracks at twice the price, DRM-locked to a chosen individual ear of the purchaser. If they can get it to work with their phone. Microsoft were careful to point out to the financial press that charging your account, however, works perfectly and that the helpline number has been connected to a fax machine.

Microsoft is confident the MusicTurd(tm) service will attract millions of people who will buy tracks from them to play on one mobile ever, not transferable to any other device including the same phone's replacement, in preference to stores offering cheaper unlocked MP3s, and won't just drive people to filesharing networks, MP3 blogs or copying 500 gigabyte USB disks full of music from their friends in sheer disgust at these corporate tools.

"We understand that lots of people use telephones they carry around with them these days," said Hugh Griffiths, Microsoft UK head of Mobile, "and you can even play music on them. A bit like a transistor radio. Whatever will they think of next! So if we get the consumer interest, we'll offer an enhanced version, MusicTurd(tm) Polished(tm). Like we're doing with Windows 7. You can't expect it to be any good until the third version, of course. So buy the first two and it'll be fantastic. Trust us on this. We have hundreds of loyal suck, er, customers on the MSN website, I'm sure we can squeeze them until the pips rattle.

"What do you mean, I'm lacking enthusiasm for our product? You'd think I was trying to get redundancy in the next round of layoffs or something. Ha! Ha! What a ridiculous notion."

[Read the original interview. Least enthusiastic marketer in history. It was quite hard to outdo.]

[Oh, and have a Zune-Anus logo.]

The screen is bigger than it looks in those photos. The part where you see the clock and signal strength are actually part of the screen.

If you check this video from the event, he demonstrates a photo app (about 35 seconds in) where the bar with signal, battery and everything slides up and is replaced by a header for the photo app. He also clicks to hide that header so you can see the full size of the screen.

I'd love to see one up close to see how well the screen blends with the surface when its showing the clock and signal.

Wrong, he posted on his blog about the "ignorance of people".

It wasn't until pcpro picked it up with the title "Teacher threatens to call the cops over Linux" when the whole thing turned into a whoring event.

Umm.. now if only we could figure out which person in the UK phoned him up and would buy Karen's last name for $1000..

mm.. UK... pcpro.co.uk... mmm, well I can't figure this out..

I wonder if the inimitable Stephen Fry would like to test it. Then they'll know they are making progress.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Anything that can reduce Mr Fry to describing anything as "cunting" and give up in despair ("I can't put up with this sort of arse") must be far beyond terrible. :D

Aw, bless.

• PCPro article
• The Microsoft mail trail (PDF)

If you want to read in the noonday sun then get an OLPC. Hell even with their shitty "buy two get one" forced charity you'd still get a better machine for less than they want for one of these turkeys. But most folks I've seen don't WANT to stand out under the noonday sun,which is why we have those nice shady benches everywhere.

I predict this will end up DOA just like those electronic books they tried to push on us in the mid '90s. It will have lousy format support,be proprietary as hell,lousy specs,and probably really crappy battery life to boot. And isn't most of the formats that folks use for text like PDF and Doc encumbered with all kinds of patents and copyrights? Boy I wouldn't want to try to traverse THAT minefield if I was a new company. And it still seems kind of pointless when you see nice netbooks with 1Gb of RAM and 1.6GHz Atom CPUs in the $300 range and Asus is talking about releasing a $200 netbook next year,which will of course allow you to read text AND watch Youtube AND email your friends AND do a little document editing on the go.

So this idea IMHO is simply too little too late. Maybe if they could sell them for $50 or less,MAYBE. But even then I would rather carry a $200 netbook and surf my news at one of the bazillion free WiFi hookups around town.

I wrote a feature recently where I explored if it was possible to run all of the standard office gadgets from sustainable power - it includes quite a few product reviews.

The purpose of a software company is to make money, and if this is by selling ads in the OS, well, guess what?
Making a stable OS is *not* Microsoft's job, making money is. If you want to opt out of this crap, DON'T BUY IT.

Somewhat off-topic and I don't want to troll, but the opt-out is your wallet. Stay with XP or do yourself a favor and switch to Linux or Mac, but just avoid vista or 7.

While 'don't buy it' is clearly a viable answer, I think my main point is that the user should choose or not choose these kinds of features at the app layer.

Yes, MS is in business to make money. Thats not the issue.

The actual implementation of this was to turn over drivers to the hardware vendors, so it's not technically MS marketing. You all DID read TFA, yes? ;)

The example was about printer cartridges. The framework for ADVERTISEMENT is being put into the OS (registry). Advertisement being one example of what the framework provides.

Aside from the obvious what-ifs like
- What if joe-toolbar overwrites it with its own ads/fluff?
- What if virus-du-jour put an executable behind that newly created malicious link?

But... what if these hardware vendors 'provide' linux drivers with similar drivel? Oh ho ho... different problem, yes?

Allowing the marketing droids into what should simply be OS->hardware interface code is a Bad Idea(tm) in my mind no matter what OS we are talking about.

More details at PC Pro

From the Device Stage link:

Microsoft is essentially handing control of the Device Stage screen to the hardware manufacturers, allowing them to embed links to their online services and client software. A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website, or a link to a PDF of the deviceâ(TM)s manual.

Phone manufacturers could include a facility to record your own ringtone, synchronise contacts, or perform specific tasks using their dedicated PC software.

Essentially, it'll be a very convenient feature, but they better be damn sure that they lock it down, else people may start seeing "cheap c1alis, /i@gra" ads when they hook up their phone or printer.

If I read TFA correctly, what Microsoft does with this "Device Stage" thingie is not much at issue. What the hardware manufacturers do is critical.

Microsoft is essentially handing control of the Device Stage screen to the hardware manufacturers, allowing them to embed links to their online services and client software.

On the one hand, it's a perfect opportunity to make life easier for consumers, by opening their eyes to features and services that apply to their particular model. On the other, it could be used as little more than a cheap form of advertising, with manufacturers attempting to lock consumers into their own proprietary software and services.

I'm betting the latter. Do I have any takers?

It is a resource hog of cpu, memory and hard drive.

I fear you're not up to speed with Norton's current line-up. Yes, some older versions were very resource-hungry, but the new 2009 edition adds only a few seconds to boot time and has a RAM footprint of just a few tens of megabytes when idle. Here's a brief review of it with a few facts and figures.

Just bury one of these puppies with it. Then you have the media and the means to retrieve it.

how is this different from the teacube circa 2004?

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/dscf0094.jpg

On http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/07/03/introducing-the-space-cube/ (which is linked from the linked article) they mention that the thing is about 2x2x2 inches, so each side is about 4 square inches.

That's ambiguous in so many ways. Taken pedantically and literally, that's a 2D plane surface of 8 square inches, since the first two 2's are dimensionless. Assuming from that they represent inches, then that's a 4D hypercube of 16 inches^4 because the last 2 is square.

Looking at the picture, I think what they actually mean is that each edge is 2 inches long, for a footprint of 4 square inches and a volume of 8 cubic inches. But seriously, can we get at least some care in how we handle units? This is primary-school stuff. And why is a British writeup of a Japanese device measuring in inches in the first place? Wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's actually 5cm on a side...

You are right. However the summery just repeats what the authors of thebrightnet say. They assume that because they are transfering bytes instead of actual copyrighted dataa they are in the clear.

They just moved the copyright act of publishing the file to publishing the hash. If that hash/key/url is the only way to retrieve that file then you can be sure that is a the people that is procecuted for the publication.

torrent sites now can hide (unsuccesful) behind the fact that they are just indexing data pulished by others just like google.

There is far simpler way to get the same result: password protect (rar,zip) the file you are publishing and give a strange name. Same result without needing a new p2p protocol.

The full review of the Nokia E71 is also now online.

I just posted a link above, reporting on the MB Air's shitty market performance to date. Here are a couple more.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/02/12/resellers-say-macbook-air-sales-arent-as-brisk-as-original-macbook/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/165960/macbook-air-sales-deflated.html

I can't locate sales figures for the 12" PB G4, but I can state anecdotally that I saw many of them, with satisfied owners. A reasonably fierce following, too. Conversely, I have not seen a single MB Air nor do I know anyone, including all members of a Mac users' mailing list I am on, who owns one or even wants to. I don't think Apple chose the most profitable market segment here.

Dell D420s are excellent machines. I've used them for testing and they are actually an excellent form factor. Small enough to chuck into a backpack but big enough that you don't notice the keyboard being cramped.

With a 9 cell battery you can get 6 hours of use

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/92149/dell-latitude-d420.html

And it comes with a built in cellular modem so you don't need to hunt for wifi hotspots. In Sweden you can get flat rate 7.2Mbit HSDPA for about 30 US$ per month. That plus a D420 and a 9 cell battery is a very useful thing indeed.