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Most egregariously, when IBM launched a lawsuit against a company providing support for the open source TurboHercules software

... IBM never sued. TurboHercules made the claim - but it never happened.

To the contrary, Microsoft gave TurboHercules money.

TurboHercules is a proxy to attack linux, same as SCO.

Your product is a complete and total failure, except in those areas a corporation can fuck you hard (and then you thank them for the surprise buttsex) thanks to the TiVo trick, ala damned near every router and other CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) and you are so far behind you actually reach 1% and cheer (and it only took 18 years! Wow!).

Meanwhile consumers run away from your product as fast as they can, and tell you in giant letters DO NOT WANT even on products designed around your strengths, and retailers look at you like the black death thanks to all the returns and broken drivers, oh and your great leader says the kernel isn't designed, it grows like a virus LOL! (Yeah Linus, it would be called an STD) and you know what is amazing and sad?

NEVER, not fucking ONCE, does it enter your tiny little mind to even ask the most basic of econ 101 questions, such as "What is my competitors doing right that I'm doing wrong?" Nope, because that would mean admitting your shit sandwich OF FREEDOM was a festering turd, which BTW? It is. Instead you scream shill or astroturfer, which is your version of nigger or spic, for anyone who doesn't suck down the kool aid and wash it down with a heaping dose of RMS cock slobber.

And the part you'll NEVER believe, because it would shatter your tiny little worldview, hiding in your mom's basement eating your Cheetos and thinking if it wasn't for that evil M$ army the world would embrace your precious shit sandwich like the force you love so much? Well guess what sparky, I'm not a shill NOR an astroturfer, I'm in fact a retailer. You know, that group that you constantly whine would carry your shit sandwiches on their shelves? yeah that bunch. And you know WHY we won't carry your rotting bag o' fail? It isn't a conspiracy BTW, it is because we tried your product and we know your lies are just that, LIES.

I tried for nearly FOUR YEARS to find ONE DSITRO, just one mind you, that wouldn't fall apart like a house of old cards when a fat guy farts, just one that would continue to run consistently after updating. Just one mind you? How many did I find? ZERO.Zilch nada squat bumpkiss. Your driver model is a drawing of a pile of shit with "do it yourself LOL!" written underneath, your idea of having software tied to the kernel is frankly laughable if it wasn't so pathetic, your package managers are just band aids on bullet wounds trying to cover up the dependency hell that hangs over everything you do like the Sword of Damocles, shall I go on? Your lack of a stable ABI, which BTW Apple, MSFT, BSD, Solaris, hell even OS fricking 2 has had for like a decade now, means that shopping for devices that will actually work is a game of "hardware roulette" that is more rigged against the consumer than anything in Vegas...

Hell I could do this all day, but why bother. It is like pushing a retard into traffic. Sure it is easy because they are so fucking stupid, but not much in the way of entertainment value, not when I have dozens of top notch AAA games I could be playing, or Netflix, or WMC, or hell washing my socks would be more entertaining than dealing with a FOSSie. BTW do us both a favor before you open your cake hole and check on Linux TM Repo before you chime in, as the horseshit you and the other FOSSies spew has been done so damned many times TM repo actually has all your bullet points down as TMs. Hell I bet whatever you come back with I can match one for one with TMs, such as WorksFo

Yeah, you're right. Because there is still SOMETHING they need to do, then it hasn't made their live EASIER. (Easier being the operative word here)

Also, sure, Google and Facebook might be secure, so ALL websites will be secure.

Wow. [citation needed] much? Let's go down the list, shall we?

1) Not only can I find no evidence of a $500M figure ever having existed before your comment, but if they had made a settlement for a half billion dollars, Sony wouldn't exist today. Their operating income last year was just $342M (source). Fat chance that Sony could survive a $500M settlement hit. By all indications (i.e. because it's not mentioned in their annual filings from that year and there are no followup stories to be found), this did not impact their bottom line in any sort of meaningful way.

2) As for what the settlement actually was, they paid up to $150-175 per customer that damaged their PC in an attempt to remove the rootkit (see here), plus $5.75M in settlements to various states (source). That's it. It probably cost them less than $10M to settle the whole thing.

3) For a quick example of a company that can take a hit like the one you talked about, we all remember the Microsoft EU antitrust case from a few years back, right? The one regarding media players, where they were fined roughly $600M, and had followup fines of roughly $250M and $1.44B, all of which were extensively covered in the news since they were, at the time, the largest fines ever handed down by the EU (more info). But Microsoft was able to absorb the hit. Of course, they could do that since their operating income last year was about $24B (source), which is roughly 70x that of Sony's.

4) As for your DOJ claims, I can't find anything about government computers being infected (though I wouldn't doubt it) or the DOJ being involved at all. In fact, they never got involved, despite the public outcry and requests that a criminal investigation be launched.

Aside from government computers getting infected, is anything you said true, or are you just routinely off by a few orders of magnitude when quoting figures, as well as prone to making up stories that have little basis in fact?

The bad news (for MS) is that I think the user base currently engrossed in tablet world are destined to ultimately go to cell phones and set-top boxes, not the directions MS are particularly strong in relative to the desktop/laptop world.

Guess who wrote the operating system that's running on my Motorola DVR from Verizon FiOS? Hint, it's a rather large company located in the Pacific Northwest.

MS has been involved in the set-top market for a decade or more. The XBox is one result of those efforts. Just because you don't see a Windows sticker on your DVR doesn't mean MS had nothing to do with it.

Here's an article from 2005 on Microsoft's efforts in the set-top market. How about an article from 1999 on its efforts to port CE to the set-top?

Nope it was Antivirus2010
although, it could be McAfee

They remotely wiped an illegally distributed copy of 1984 and refunded your money.

Two months after a high school student sued Amazon for removing George Orwell's "1984" from his Kindle e-reader, along with all his notes, Amazon has settled the lawsuit.

keep the facts straight.

I'm rather surprised they didn't buy Comcast.

That'd be silly, considering AT&T Created the Comcast we know today by selling them AT&T Broadband in 2001. What kind of business would buy back a business they'd already spun off...

oh.

Congratulations, pedantic bore, you were quoted in this article! :)

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/222559/after_rsa_breach_are_securid_tokens_in_jeopardy.html

Yow!

I better bookmark this. Annual performance reviews are coming up in a few months!

I can imagine how this is going to play out when the IT folks at my company find out about this. They'll panic, revoke all the SecureID cards, and then no more working from home until something much more complicated, unreliable, and probably requiring Windows7 is found to replace it.

Congratulations, pedantic bore, you were quoted in this article! :)

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/222559/after_rsa_breach_are_securid_tokens_in_jeopardy.html

Yeah, I realized my mistake only after I read that article again. That said, I also found this:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215779/windows_8_on_arm_expands_microsofts_mobile_horizons.html

And while it is a nice attempt (so far) what I expect to see is the same things we have seen from Microsoft for decades -- they will support Alpha or some other processor for a while and realize "we can save money by dropping support for this minority thing" and then kill it. And according to the review above, while the machines made an admirable attempt, it is still the same old Windows being a resource hog and barely making it work. (For that matter, the 64 bit x86 processor support seems to be really lacking too -- they just can't convince software developers to update their code to 64 bit!! Think your new 64 bit quad core monster will deliver awesome performance on your game machine with nVidia optimus driving the graphics? Nope!!)

Once again, Microsoft is attempting to shoe-horn their old code into new places. I just don't expect it to work. What I expect to see, however, is Microsoft giving a ton of money to ARM makers to boost performance on their machines in order to support their software. This will benefit Microsoft but will also benefit Linux and other OSes on the same hardware in a much more dramatic way... (Unless, of course, they manage to bribe ARM makers to keep their performance enhancements locked down in a way similar to GPU makers like NVidia who only really supports Windows.)

I'm still waiting for something really surprising to happen... been waiting for a very long time. I wasn't surprised that Vista was an utter failure. I wasn't surprised that Windows 7 was more of an apology than a new OS. Microsoft exists on its defense of its market dominance alone. They haven't done anything exceptional with the Windows OS since Win9X or possibly Windows 2000.

Microsoft is eroding away due to its failure to keep up with the changes. Most people can't see it yet, but I certainly can. I think it became rather evident when the public stopped cheering at MS Product announcements.

I haven't seen statistics indicating that the Apple laptop reliability was below average. Could you point me to such statistics? When I look, I only see things like http://www.pcworld.com/article/156450/apple_laptops_extend_their_lead_in_reliability.html which indicate the exact opposite of what you claim.

But Microsoft does sue companies that make products with names similar to Windows. They sued Lindows. If Microsoft can successfully sue over the Windows trademark, why can't Apple successfully sue over the App Store trademark?

Microsoft couldn't successfully sue over the Windows trademark. Microsoft lost that case [citation], and after 2 more years of trying to appeal the decision they eventually gave up and bought the Lindows trademark for $20 million [citation] instead.

Seriously, Google uses Java prolifically enough across multiple platforms --- why not just buy the rights to Java and open source it. The company has tons of money, and I'm pretty sure Google would be a better steward. I mean, how long has Java 7 been in the works? Even Google's own Java architect thinks the language has fallen behind. Google could fix what's wrong with Java and in record time.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/219725/government_employs_hackers_in_brave_new_scheme.html
"...harness those within the hacking community who typically present research at black or white hat conventions but whose work flies under the radar of DARPA."
"hacker incubators" and made it clear that the DoD would not request commercial rights to any innovations discovered.
" a new type of Windows rootkit that was undetectable and almost impossible to remove." http://crowdleaks.org/hbgary-inc-working-on-secret-rootkit-project-codename-magenta/

Note that a large portion of the money for DARPA is going to cybersecurity research with Mudge of the L0pht as the DARPA Program Manager.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/219725/government_employs_hackers_in_brave_new_scheme.html
[2] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/darpas-star-hacker-looks-to-wikileak-proof-the-pentagon/
[3] http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/07/internet-creators-ask-hackers-help/

HTC is also paying Microsoft patent license fees on their android phones.

I read this story earlier on PCWorld. The thing about the investigation that jolts me the most is the implicit trust given to the NASA engineers as if they are the 'experts' on source code. I have respect for them, but who decided that they are the ultimate authority? Also, the claim that they reviewed 280,000 lines of source code is a little bit ridiculous as well. Ask anyone who has done any enterprise coding on big and complex projects and they will scoff at this. There is no way to 'review' that much code and account for every possible circumstance.

I have a feeling that this is just PR material sponsored jointly by Toyota and the US government to spur consumer spending and sweep shit under the rug.

Should they open source the ECU? Just saying...

Knowing whether a photo or video has been digitally altered is important for images used as legal evidence. I would not be surprised to see makers of digital cameras and editing software embed a digital signature that can be used to detect alteration. Perhaps with software like Photoshop, it might even record what types of modification were done. There would be little reason to mistrust a photo that was merely rescaled, for example.

Keep in mind that some digital technology already embeds data to prevent counterfeiting.

I'm sorry ... what? 15 million units in one year isn't impressive? You realize the iPad is now the fastest selling consumer electronic device in HISTORY. Outselling the everything from the iPhone to DVD players?

Slightly more informative article with a link to a PDF of the complaint: http://www.pcworld.com/article/218381/atandt_accused_of_overbilling_iphone_ipad_users.html

And yet.... sony seems to love smart phones...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/218065/sony_hedges_bets_with_playstation_suite.html

  Playstation Suite, a software framework that will let Android phones run Playstation games. Sony skimped on details, but said Playstation Suite will start with PSOne games when it launches for Android 2.3 phones later this year

Yah... I thought the same and was actively boycotting Sony since the Rootkit fiasco (I even had my 5 minute fame while fighting those bastards).

I did it until I wanted to buy an ebook reader. I waited and looked for all the options; I compared the Kindle vs the Sony eReader. Surprisingly, Sony's ereader is more open than Kindles (e.g. copy/paste PDFs, DOCs ePubs into SD Card [yes SD-card]) and the quality was quite good. Originally I waited for the Asus DR-900, which I saw at the ceBit 2010 (it was a good surprise when I was there... nobody gave attention but as a loyal asus customer.... i liked what I saw).

But after waiting for almost one year, this last christmas I decided to fuck it and go for it. I got a PRS 950SC and could not be happier. It is a really neat piece of hardware that has me completely hardwired into my books.

BTW... I was also surprised that product quality-wise Sony is not that bad... of course Asus is better =oP

My bad. I had read that Verizon launched a WP7 phone in November 2010. It turns out later that wasn't accurate. The latest word is "whenever the phones are ready." At this point, it appears MS has missed the holiday season with Verizon even though they said back in February 2010 that MS would launch the phone. Now Verizon has announced the iPhone, it'll be interesting to see whether Apple gets their phone out before MS even though MS promised theirs almost a year ago. But the fact still remains that MS has said 1.5 million phones were "shipped" not sold. LG has said the sales were not "what everyone expected."

That 1.5 million number represents sales of phones by manufacturers to retailers, not sales of retailers to customers.

Or just skip the stupid itworld.com summary and go to the original article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/209584/cops_hacker_posted_stolen_xrated_pics_on_facebook.html

Yes, but you don't have to be connected to the internet to have something hacked. It just requires more effort by the hacker if it isn't.

Real soon now...

Here's a link to the same story in American

Now, if only the summary or the articles told what the heck EMC makes...it's not at all clear from their jargon filled company website, although I did find that they employ 40000 people making whatever it is...

Here's a link to the same story in American

When South Korea passed a law that requires large websites with user-generated contents to collect user's personal information, Google simply disabled the uploading and commenting features in YouTube for Korean users and encouraged them to set their locale to some other country. This continued for a year, shining a spotlight on South Korea's stupid law until the government gave up and exempted YouTube from the law.

Yes people aren't as perfectly rational as we assume, either they simply ignore the risk of something fairly unlikely like getting caught on any one occasion or they don't know the actual risks.

ok... time for a few sums....

http://www.pcworld.com/article/137459/cctv_cameras_dont_solve_crimes_say_london_politicians.html

"Over the last decade, London's CCTV cameras have cost taxpayers there around £200 million (US$308 million)"

So...
over 200 million over 10 years comes out at £54794.52 per day.

assuming the claim in TFA is correct then that's £9132.42 per crime.
I have no idea if they include trivial ones like shoplifters but knowing politicans I'd bet they do if they want it to sound better.

What's a police officers salary?
Would it be less than 55K per year?
Would an individual police officer be reasonably expected to be able to solve/stop more than 6 crimes per year?

Not entirely a myth. It is a source of frustration for users when they want some feature that they can't get on a newer version of Android. They buy a phone expecting to get the same features they saw on Friend X's phone, only to find it isn't available. The fact that Google is responding to those complaints speaks volumes about the 'myth'.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/192841/googles_plan_to_end_android_fragmentation.html

First look at the CR-48:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/213168/google_cr48_first_look_at_the_first_chrome_os_laptop.html?tk=rel_news

Working on the CR-48 can feel like walking a tightrope without a net (pardon the pun). If you're not connected to the Internet on this laptop, you're dead in the water. I wrote this article in Google Docs on the CR-48 during my commute. I should have been fine, because I had a Verizon Mi-Fi card for connectivity (our CR-48 arrived without a SIM card, so I couldn't test out the built-in 3G connection). But halfway through my commute, Chrome reported that it couldn't reach Google Docs. On any other laptop, this would be no problem. I'd copy my existing text into Word and continue working there. But on the CR-48, my options were severely limited. I pasted my changes into an Evernote note instead and hoped that I wouldn't lose my connection to that service.

That's the problem with the cloud. Any problems on your end, at google, or anywhere in between, or if you forget to pay your cellular bill, you're not getting that proposal out to clients, you're not getting your tax returns in on time, you're not getting your paper in on time, etc.

A smooth Android install on an iPhone?

Here's a how-to that doesn't mention problems:

http://www.redmondpie.com/install-android-2.2.1-froyo-on-iphone-3g-2g-using-bootlace-in-cydia-no-computer-required/

Some other articles say it is a work in progress with issues, but perhaps those are out of date?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196595/how_to_install_android_on_your_iphone.html

Perhaps you're braver than I would be. Have fun!

Yeah, let's see what major game developers think about authoring for 400 ever-so-slightly different, ever-so-slightly incompatible Android platforms with nothing resembling market discipline.

Face it. Apple has out-Nintendoed Nintendo, out-Sonied Sony, and out-Microsofted Microsoft. Everybody else has already gone over the cliff edge, they just haven't looked down yet.

And I'm not saying this is a good thing.

The biggest reason I can think of for using an alternative DNS is independence from governments. Since Amazon clearly bows to US government pressure and removed wikileaks I see it as a failure on this front.

As of 2007, IBM's Blue Gene/P system cost $1.3M per rack, and the Blue Gene/L cost $800K (per a PCWorld story entitled http://www.pcworld.com/article/135334/ibm_drops_price_on_supercomputer.html). However, it should be noted that the hardware cost of such systems doesn't reflect the total configuration and operating cost. Many news outlets have reported on the favorable overall cost effectiveness of building supercomputing clusters with PS3s. Yellow Dog Linux has features specifically designed to support the Cell/B.E. CPU.

EveryDNS already said that their DNS servers were getting DDoSed, and so they found it a better move to drop one customer and their baggage for the sake of their other thousands of customers.

True, they are usually the fastest network. At least the cap isn't only 2 GB like on some other networks -_-

That's far from my experience; I travel with a Verizon and an AT&T USB modem and use whichever is faster. I have found that most of the time Verizon is 3G service, where AT&T is sometimes not - but when I do get 3G from AT&T, it's always WAY faster than Verizon.

And it's not just me...

Red Hat/Fedora servers had been hacked compromising the private signing key http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150212/hackers_crack_into_red_hat.html

Ubuntu repositories hacked http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150212/hackers_crack_into_red_hat.html

And don't forget the Debian SSL key debacle....

Red Hat/Fedora servers had been hacked compromising the private signing key http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150212/hackers_crack_into_red_hat.html

Ubuntu repositories hacked http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150212/hackers_crack_into_red_hat.html

And don't forget the Debian SSL key debacle....

Two years ago, an article in PC World likened putting a video card in a laptop to open heart surgery. Has this improved over the past two years? And how do kids convince mom to buy them gaming laptops instead of Nintendo DS?

I can't answer that. All the laptops my friends have are made for gaming, and they are all over 25 so purchased them on their own.

Well, I play on my desktop, and they play on their laptops.

Two years ago, an article in PC World likened putting a video card in a laptop to open heart surgery. Has this improved over the past two years? And how do kids convince mom to buy them gaming laptops instead of Nintendo DS?

I couldn't have said it better myself. In the end, the primary things that are important to a typical end user are ease of use, quality of features, customer support, and design excellence, all of which Apple excels at producing.

A simple example is product activation. There is none for OS X. Its something that many end users of Windows will hit at some point in their day to day use and upgrades of a Windows OS. They are treated suspiciously, and in short, like criminals if too much of their hardware has changed. Apple treats their customers like customers in this respect. There are no limits to your install, no activation keys, no phone numbers to call, and no tedious 16 digit keys to input.

Another example is simple hardware reliability.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189986/report_gives_apple_top_honors_for_reliability.html

Apple consistently performs at the top spot for reliability, and that makes for happy customers. These are things that they don't need to check the web reviews for, or ask their geek friend for advice. Simple word of mouth carries this sort of appeal to new customers. They are obviously doing something different if they consistently get top grades in product reliability. All hardware is not created equal, even if it comes from China. Apple has a good reputation with it's customers, plain and simple.

Last but not least, is ease of use. There is a simple expectation that products from Apple are fuss-free. As a general rule, those hold true. They spend a great deal of time and money getting things 'right' so that their customers don't struggle with technology, which in turn also benefits from word of mouth.

There are many things that a techie can dislike about Apple, but there are many things that they should appreciate. It's willingness to advance new tech even if it is potentially risky in the market place, it's willingness to open source and contribute to open source, it's stance on privacy (google Apple Facebook), and it's basic ability to get people excited about technology in general.

Yet every iPhone susceptible to that exposure could be updated within 2 weeks. I would like to see Android pull that one off...

If Apple gets around to it, of course.

They've been known to let vulnerabilities go until they can roll them all up into a nice 250MB-or-so patch.

Hey, what's the rush? They're not a target.

Not just in japan. I submitted a story about Malaysia rolling this out over a year and a half ago. Heck, In 2007 Wells Fargo started testing a pay-by-phone in the USA. This has been happening in Asia for a long time and coming in the USA for a long time.

Wrong. They chose to respond to piracy with DRM. It has been showed repeatedly that even in the time of internet file sharing, DRM-free content sells better than their counterparts.

"The stupid response to X caused Y" does not mean "X caused Y"

What was I saying about abandonware?

Uh, that's xserve not xgrid. the two are not related other than xserves were yet another piece of hardware you could run xgrid on.

As for objective-C. it's in the public domain so it's not anymore beholden to apple than C++ is. Apple just keeps it growing since they are the primary beneficiaries. As a result many ObjectivC libs are apple only, but that's also true of libraries written for any platform like windows or linux or solaris.

I'm a big Objective-C fan, but running against you are the fact that most of the modern features that give it some parity with Java -- like the GC and the functional programming features -- are only supported by one extremely mercurial vendor that has a nasty tendency of making no 5-year roadmaps. Also the framework and libraries just don't offer the same coverage as Java. A lot of people at the turn of the century bet on WebObjects, which was a serious platform at that time, and now it's abandonware. Nobody wants to get burned like that again.

Everything I need to know about OSX Xgrid Cluster Computing

What was I saying about abandonware?