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Sorry, but I screwed up and remembered it wrong. The law in question (Jr. already signed it) was (in part) for "set top box" converting from Digtial to Analog. Duh. Still though, bet that analog out has macrovision embedded... Are macrovision scrubber still legal?

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124670,0 0.asp

No, Apple did not switch too soon.

Remember, we (the loyal Apple customers) have been waiting for a significant increase in computing power within the portable market.

IBM made promises to Apple but were unable to deliver on those promises. Remember the statements about 3 GHz within a year? Apple couldn't sit by while IBM broke promise after promise on upcoming product lines.

If Apple had waited any longer, they would have lost momentum in the portables market, and in turn the desktop computer market, eventually pulling down the servers and everything else with it.

On the other hand, Apple could always keep their servers on the IBM product line. I doubt they would, but it's always a possibility. Apple might just not be done with the PPC for good.

They are already advocating it.
The National ID sports RFID.
You could be detected when you walk near a hidden scanner.

Who is to say, this information isn't going to end up in the hands of Alberto Gonzalez and the rest of Administration.

We already know how did that go with the search engine data.

Some related notes:
http://www.unrealid.com/
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121077,R SS,RSS,00.asp

The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?

On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.

You can get a web enabled washing machine. It automatically downloads clothing care programs. However, the 1st generation machine needs to be connected to a PC in order to download files, but the 2nd generation machine will have a built-in modem.

The machine is the result of a three-year development project that involved 30 engineers and cost roughly $3.5 million, according to the company.

There was also a web-enabled refrigerator that would allow you to download music, E-mail, take photographs and do teleconferencing. Photograph of the machine. Original article

And there's also a microwave with a built in LCD display which doubles as a TV screen and CCTV system so you can see what is cooking inside.

Add a personality chip and a speech synthesizer, and your refrigerator could become your personal dietician. As Dave Lister would say Smeg.

In a galaxy not so far away,

the Old Software was crumbling away, rotting from the corruption and treachery within. Power-hungry technocrats and wealthy bureaucrats maneuvered and bribed their way into office, while one ambitious ex-Hobbyist plotted to destroy the Hobbyists and rule the galaxy. Hoping to restore virtue and the remembered glory of the Software, the High Council of Free Software dispatched the Geeks - protectorate of justice in the galaxy - on a quest to retrieve the lost Source Code. They believed that the small incomprehensible object (which intensified the power of the Code) would unite the disaffected among the people and would destroy the corruption around them. However, within their Free Software, the evil ex-Hobbyist had other traitorous designs. Foreseeing that the Code would secure his position as The Hacker, he deceived one of the...uhh Wookies! and sent him to acquire the Code. . .

PC World as an article on this where AFP sued Google for copyright infringement and Google dropped 'em. It appears AFP is just now getting back to the traffic levels they had before the row with Google.

fYou said, "All hotfix installers released since XP-SP2 have had an /integrate switch to do just that."

I tried that with two installers I just downloaded, and both had the /integrate switch.

A previous comment said to download the critical updates from here: Microsoft Updates Catalog, using Internet Explorer. Be sure to hunt for "Windows XP SP2". If you choose the logical "Windows XP Professional SP2", you will be offered only a ton of junk.

The system puts the files deep in separate folders. It is necessary to use an application like XXCopy or the File Finder in PowerDesk 4 from Ontrack to move the .EXE files to one folder. XXCopy and the File Finder in PowerDesk 4 are programs you need anyway. I've had problems with later free versions of PowerDesk, so I stay with the free PowerDesk 4.

There was no way to put the command line switches into a Slashdot comment, so I made a web page: Windows Update Installation Command Line Switches.

I haven't done the integration yet, but it looks promising.

I see now how to get critical updates. Skip "Windows XP Professional SP2" in the menu, and go to "Windows XP SP2".

The system puts the files deep in separate folders. It is necessary to use an application like XXCopy or the File Finder in PowerDesk 4 from Ontrack to extract the exe files to one folder.

XXCopy and the File Finder in PowerDesk 4 are programs you need anyway.

I've had problems with later free versions of PowerDesk, so I stay with the free PowerDesk 4.

Sure, XP is the now the most popular Windows, 4 years after its release, but it was a flop compared to the previous releases (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,76724,0 0.asp). Businesses are happy with Windows 2000. It took XP two years to overcome 2000 in the W3Schools browser statistics, and 2000 is still pretty strong at 13%. XP is most popular today because it comes preinstalled on new systems, and all the older systems are gradually dying of hardware failures or obsoletion.

" removing content, from Google News sources ": Google's always had a policy of not indexing things people don't want indexed. That's not evil, that's polite. Agence France Presse is shooting itself in the foot by not being indexed by Google News, but hey, that's their point.

" Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats ": Did you read the article. This is temporary. Google is continuing to fight for the right to index books in the courts. Having to wait until the court case is finished is annoying, but is hardly Google actively being evil.

" DMCA complaints ": Google's just obeying the law. The law is bad. To try and show that the law is bad, Google is working with Chilling Effects to document the cases, specifically provides links to the takedown notices with contain the links in question. Maybe it would better if Google were to break the law, but I'm hard pressed to call someone attempting to protest a bad law to the extent possible "evil." At worst they've simply failed to be as good as they could be.

I disagree. Subsidizing evil's still evil. Many are claiming Google's shunning of the government's request has nothing to do with protecting privacy, but rather trade secrets, which could be reverse engineered from making such massive lists (potentially) public. As with the censored Chinese Google News, when it comes to removing content, from Google News sources to multiple DMCA complaints to the now infamous Google Print caving in to publishers legal threats, the company has been consistent: they do what's best for stockholder value. I don't see how their slogan can be "do no evil" for much longer.

As for your foreign policy analogies, I'm a bigger fan of Containment than Brinkmanship, but that's just because I saw the former work with the USSR and what the latter is accomplishing today.

No joke - the restaurant is Moto, in Chicago. See here for details.

PCWorld reported on IBM's new 970 chips.

I don't understand this at all (and I did look at IBM's site, they list power consumption for a 2 GHz 970 at around 50W). How is it that a G5 Powerbook was such a problem?

The only thing I can think is that there are no power conservation features on the chip, and/or the support chips take quite a bit of power.

At any rate, Core Duo laptops look to be good for 5.5 hours of moderate use...that's quite good for a single core system, let alone dual core. :-)

And I really wonder why on earth Apple doesn't mention it on its website, after it has done so for all these years...

Also, note that Taiwanese have already integrated their economy into the economy of mainland China although the political systems remain separate. There is the distinct possibility that the Taiwanese government may standardize on the Chinese version of Linux: that version is Red Flag Linux.

The Taiwanese have already invested more than $100 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China. Following the example set by mainland Chinese companies, Taiwanese companies have also sold weapons technology to Iran: Washington slapped sanctions against both Taiwanese companies and Chinese companies. (My source is "The Federal Register" for January 2005.)

More than 1 million Taiwanese have already emigrated to mainland China. They voluntarily choose to live under the authoritarian rules of Beijing and view being ruled by Beijing as simply an inconvenience. I suspect that most Taiwanese have used Red Flag Linux; certainly, most of the Taiwanese emigrants to China have used it.

As a side note, we Americans should never sacrifice our time, our money, or even our lives to prevent a mere inconvenience for the Taiwanese, and we should terminate our support for Taiwan. The Taiwanese have manipulated us Americans completely. (The Taiwanese constitution even insists that Tibet should be integrated into "One China".)

You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.

The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.

For Antivirus, use AVG. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall or Zone Alarm. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.

No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware and Spybot. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.

I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.

Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB, which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.

There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.

Everytime I see an article about building a media center PC, people always seem to use normal composite or S-Video outputs. Is there a good solution for HD output? Is there a video card supported by linux that can do Y-Cr-Cb component video output at 720p or 1080i? I once had an ATI card that would do this, but it only worked in Windows and even then it didn't compensate for overscan so 10% of the screen got chopped off. Some people have been able to use PowerStrip under windows to get certain video cards to output HDTV compatable timings for TVs that support RGB component inputs. Obviously, this solution is less than ideal. Last time I looked, there wasn't a good solution. Maybe things have changed. Ideally, I'd like to find a video card with HDMI output, but I'm guessing that doesn't exist either. Maybe a fellow slashdotter can prove me wrong.

Intel has already demonstrated at NAND flash drive used to reduce boot times:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123053,0 0.asp

So you are probaly right that Apple and Intel might be cooperating on a similar project.

I remember that Steve Jobs gave a key note a few years back on talking about how they wanted to reduce boot times to 0 because it would save people hours a year waiting for the computer to boot. However, I wouldn't expect anything til late this year or 2007.

While you could explain Google's actions in this way, it is misleading. Google started out as a research project by two guys that wanted to make a better search engine. It worked really well.

The ads are something they need to do to survive as a company, but it's not their main line of reasoning. From the get-go, Google has always been decidedly non-evil.

Try explaining them buying Picasa that way. I can imagine Larry or Sergei thinking "Hmmm, I need to organize my pictures... This looks nice... Maybe we should site-license it for the employees... Aah what the heck, we'll just buy it and release it for free!"

Putting those capitalistic lines of reasoning on it is just unfair. Note, raygundan, that I'm not saying you are doing it, you're extending the logic, but I disagree with the outset.

Ten things I didn't know about Google

There is no sig.

Please help me develop a security system. I intend for my victim to use for something really secret and important (launch codes, financial information, medical records and the like). It has to be based on a platform that is constantly found to be completely insecure and which is widely believed to be unfixable. Also, to make things really interesting I thought I'd get a bunch who've been known to issue certs to people posing as employees of their customers.

Next week I'll be looking at turning water into wine...

Microsoft, VeriSign Warn of Security Hole

I propose some simple method of authorizing users. Maybe you could exchange keys with people by pressing some button while shaking their hands. Even with just the people I trust enough to exchange the keys to my mp3s that way I'd be able to build a fairly sizeable collection. Now, moving on to friends of friends etc. I'd have all music in the world within a few years - and the popular stuff within days. That is, if I cared for illegal file sharing.

Most of the quarterly numbers come from IDC and/or Gartner Group, research companies which specializes in compiling such figures.

For instance, here's the 3rd quarter 2005 figures:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123213,0 0.asp

Note that the figures quoted may be a bit off from the numbers in the charts I linked to, because of error corrections which were made after the article posted, rounding errors, etc.

Apple's own official figures can be found in the Investor Relations section of their website:

http://www.apple.com/investor/

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124149,0 0.asp

Instead of getting modded as flamebait I'll just link to PCWorld's 2006 Notebook Reliability and Service Survey where Apple actually remains at the top of the charts.

Hey if I just spent $5,000 on a new computer I'd have a hard time admitting it's a lemon too. ;)

Actually, this is possible. More cumbersome than with LILO, but it is possible. I've written about the method here. (Scroll down for the GRUB goods.)

First, I want to agree with you re: the somewhat sinister disregard for individual privacy when companies want to sell stuff. I have joked that Lucifer himself sits on the Board of Doubleclick. No doubt the former DoubleClick officer (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110299, 00.asp) is charged with the task of tuning processes and systems to comply while still getting what the agency wants.

Second, I'd like to suggest coming up with a pattern for bogus data when you're asked by various retailers, etc. Try to come up with something that identifies the source of the data so you know what channel certain data came from. Think: a middle name of "Berlin" for WalMart (the Berlin Wall). It's interesting where you see data pop up when you do this.

J

I have seen a PCWorld article http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123615,p g,4,00.asp claiming Opera 9 will support widgets, however I am unclear on what the magazine means by this. Will they be on the desktop or will they be somewhat like Firefox's extensions? Also, to all of those claiming Opera does not have Adblocking features, try going to this page: http://nontroppo.org/wiki/BlockAdvertisements I suggest using OperaAdFilter (http://www.operaadfilter.com/) for the most integration with the browser and for its ease of use.

Disney is a backer of Blu-ray, not HD-DVD.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118880,0 0.asp

While Disney may have had a hand in the development of iHD, the bond with Microsoft I don't think is really that loyal.

Wow, what a well reasoned responce.

Some points I'd like to add. I chose 32Gig SD as my example because they are expected in 2006, and the /. post is about predictions for 2006.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122514,0 0.asp I chose SD because it is a lot smaller than CF. take these two factors into account and flash starts to get a serious size and weight advantage.
The best sustained (read or write) hard disk performance of IDE drives is 60 MegaBytes per second according to a recent article on Toms Hardware. The best flash drive, as tested by Toms, had a sustained performance of 23 Megabytes per second write speed with 30MB per second read performance. That means you only need a 3 wide stripe to get the same through-put as a disk. The real advantage of flash is in seek times which are sub 1 milisecond.
I think the power requirements of an idle flash drive would be significantly less than any hard disk no matter how many "cards" in the array. They dont use power when they are not reading or writing. The power usage when reading or writing might be significantly more, as you calculated.

Obviously, we are discussing a theoretical product due to price considerations. I have pointed out in other posts that it could be 11 years before flash catches 3 1/2" IDE disk in the $ per meg area. I think there siginificant advantages to flash that will mean the transition will occur when the price is right.

Thanks again for a well reasoned reply.

"Australias has to adopt DMCA under the Australian/American Free Trade agreement so I guess its a little late for this now though."

Laws are still interpreted by the courts. Currently the interpretation of the law by the High Court is that you are not bypassing copy protection unless you are making illegal copies. From the linked article:

In its ruling, the court said that while making a pirated copy of a game is illegal, playing a game using a "mod chip" is not. Mod chips, such as those installed by Stevens, allow PlayStations to play games from other geographic regions. Normally, PlayStations--like DVD players and other game consoles--can play only media made for a specific region.

Although this desicion is being reviewed by the Federal Government and new DCMA law changes are due in 1 January 2007, the changes will have "other exceptions identified under a legislative or administrative review as addressing a credibly demonstrated actual or likely adverse effect on non-infringing use." so it seems relatively likely that with our new fair use rights, the DMCA importation will be unlikey to make mod chips or DeCSS illegal, especially since the High Court has specifically stated that bypassing region encoding is not breaching copyright. "Apparently intentionally, those restrictions (region encoding) reduce global market competition. They inhibit rights ordinarily acquired by Australian owners," said the court in its judgement.

I get the joke, but seriously, I got that huge ballyhooed Dell monitor (no squeals or anything yet *crosses fingers and toes*) and if I decide to maximize a window with a web page to the full 1920 by 1200, the one that stays 600 pixels wide with teeny-tiny 8pt Arial font will get negatively noticed, and kittens start dying.

Opera makes that point moot though, since it resizes images, along with fonts, with its zoom feature. I wait patiently for both IE and Firefox to improve their resizing. (Translation: IE, replace that Smallest-Small-Medium-etc. test-size-type thing with a smoother, more versatile zoom, and resize images; and Firefox, resize images with text when I press Ctrl+plus/minus. That way, pages look better and not tiny in HD, I think, while designers will care less about pixels.)

actually, the specs on this back in May, http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120845,0 0.asp said that this thing would "have 256MB of main memory, 1GB of flash memory in place of a hard drive" which still isnt a bad thing, but it clears up a lot of the memory pricing speculation.

Yes, Texasand the Electronic Frontier Foundation both have filled suits. http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123668,0 0.asp/

Disgusting or not, it's a gummy bear.

The rest of the process might discourage you from eating it as well. Just be sure to use regular gummies, as the sugar-free variety containing maltitol or the like can cause laxation... and that's the last thing you'd want to have while trying to escape with those top-secret documents.

Also, there are other ways around biometrics that don't involve candy.

Microsoft is coming out with another version of it's popular XP operating system that is the most secure OS to date claims Balmer

Patents aren't issued on the basis of being innovative, just on being original and being the first invention. That's part of the problem: a company can invent something, keep it quiet so only patent trawlers would be aware of it, wait for someone to invent the same thing innovatively (eg. actually put it into production and let people have it), and then sue the pants off them.

This is one of the reasons Microsoft's views on patents aren't as simple as the average Slashdotter would think. As a company that does sell what it makes, original or otherwise, it's threatened by patents, some quite obvious to people in the field (such as the Eolas patent on plugins.) And Free Software, while under threat from them, isn't as under threat as Microsoft would hope. Only in the case of true malice or a fear free distribution is competing with royalty-payers is it worth a patent holder enforcing patent claims against a Free Software programmer - they're better off going to distributors and sellers of the software concerned. Microsoft can use patents to bash Free Software, but it's well aware the entire scheme is a double-edged sword.

Yeah, and native resolution is the highest resolution an LCD screen can generally do, lower resolutions are interpolated which as you pointed out looks like crap most of the time. This review, this one (over in the pros), and this one (way down in going wider) all note the resolution, typically in the first line. If it were interpolated all three reviews wouldn't rave about the displays unless Mikey was passing out a good chunk of his fortune. These are 15.4" widescreen screens with a native resolution of 1920x1200. "They are real, and they are spectacular!"
Since they are laptop screens they go pretty cheap on ebay when someone breaks their computer but the screen is in good shape.

* Winning the "PC World World Class Award" for being #2 on the list of The 100 Best Products of 2005. (We don't mind being #2, especially to Firefox. Plus, it gives us more to work for.)

* Winning the "PC World World Class Award" for being #2 on the list of The 100 Best Products of 2005. (We don't mind being #2, especially to Firefox. Plus, it gives us more to work for.)

wtf -> OS X 10.4 and Ubuntu are office software??? (http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,1207 63,pg,3,00.asp)

From the July 2005 issue of PC World magazine

I think the problem (from their perspective) is that Linux users don't want to play DVDs in the way the RIAA wants to let them. Also, most Linux users will reject any proprietary / non-Free solution and worship the ground "DVD-John" walks on. On the other hand, many Linux users don't have a problem using the NVIDIA binaries, so maybe there is a place for proprietary dvd playback software on Linux.

That may or may not be the case, but how can they possibly know? There is *STILL* no sign of legal DVD Player software for linux that can be purchased by anyone. The MPAA DVD FAQ uses the excuse that there are two legal DVD players that have been "announced" giving links to SigmaDesigns and InterVideo [The makers of WinDVD]. I challenge you to find and purchase a copy of DVD Player software from either of those websites. A google search for "legal linux dvd player" comes up with some news items from November 2000 mentioning the announcement of LinDVD from InterVideo. But as you can see from the link, it is still not available to be purchased by end users. Gee, it's only been FIVE FARKING YEARS PEOPLE!!!

So until there is a legal Linux DVD player available for me to purchase at a reasonable price [if a hardware DVD player only costs $29 at Walmart, I should be able to get some software for quite a bit less than that], the MPAA will just have to deal with me using deCSS. They have no excuse and no choice in the matter.

Trend Micro's non-corporate suite is widely reguarded as the best in the business; C|Net touts that it "is the best antivirus software package I've seen in a long while" (in Why you should ditch Norton AntiVirus), and PC World declares "hands-on evaluation points to Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 2005 as the clear winner here" (in Internet Security Suites Face Off). We like it because it is easy to install, administer, and use, it is cheap, and it integrates perfectly with Windows XP Service Pack 2's security system (while Norton and Mcafee do not; see the reviews).

deja vu: this story (and the pcworld article linked from it) almost perfectly describe what happened to me when i attempted to use froogle to buy a monitor last month. the phone calls that went nowhere, the arguments with sales managers about why a camera shop in new york would tell me i needed to buy a power adapter for my "international" model, and then, the eventual shutdown when i refused to budge.

after trying several places, i eventually spent $100 more at newegg, and got exactly what i wanted almost immediately.

i suppose this is a strong argument agaist froogle which, afaik, doesn't spend nearly as many man-hours policing its sellers as the other aggregators mentioned.

Excuse me for not going to Google. Search on:

walmart linux pc

Here's the first hit: WalMart Offers a New Linux PC. And another one: Wal-Mart Expands Linux Offerring.

Yes, for most it may be extremely easy. But in case you haven't had to do it for some time:

To disable JavaScript in IE, click Tools, Internet Options and choose the Security tab. Click the Internet icon, click the Default Level button, and move the slider to High.

...Shamelessly stolen from here.

Firefox 1.5 will be released on Nov. 29

"Microsoft has joined a growing group of security software vendors who are treating Sony BMG Music Entertainment's controversial Extended Copy Protection (XCP) copy protection software as a threat. Microsoft has announced it will begin treating the software as spyware and offering users tools to remove it, just as a Princeton University computer science researcher raised questions about a second Sony copy protection product."

From pcworld

after consumer protest, Sony's stopping producing this stuff.