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darkComet (aka darkComet-RAT) is the name of a remote administration tool, which BlackHoleRAT's control functionality is derived from. The trojan is actually called BlackHoleRAT, but regardless, here's an article link.

And, while I'm going, the distortion of the term "trojan" is starting to test my patience. A trojan horse is a piece of software that is deceptive in nature, one which appears to perform a desirable function, but, in fact, steals information or harms the system its occupying. This application, darkComet-RAT, is referred to as a trojan itself all over the web in news articles relating to this beta of "BlackHoleRAT," which is NOT the case. darkComet-RAT is a legit remote administration tool, similiar in functionality to VNC, and should be treated as such.

I understand this butchering of the acronym "RAT," between its use as "Remote Administration Tool" and "Remote Access Trojan" may be confusing, as with all acronyms that use the same letters, but please, for the love of god, do some damn fact checking, and this would be less likely to happen.

Grumble grumble grumble.

I read your blog and have a question and a comment, first the question: Have you tried using an SD card for Readyboost yet? On smaller machines such as that I've found having a dedicated Readyboost (and lets face it, 4Gb SD cards are cheap) will give it a nice pick me up, especially when it comes to game. Think of it as giving yourself some of the advantages of a hybrid drive for ultra cheap, as Readyboost will have small random reads cached to the SD (where the read speed is near instantaneous) while leaving sequential read/write to the HDD. I'd love to see what kind of gaming numbers you get with that unit before/after Readyboost.

Now the comment: Why the Starter hate? For years Linux guys have complained about how "bloated" MSFT OSes had become so you finally get a bloat free MSFT OS with all the bling bling and apps you don't like/use gone bye bye and STILL you bitch? I mean WTF? If you're only real hatred is the wallpaper you DO know that can be changed in seconds with the use of the free third party tool I just linked to, yes?

But considering by your own admission all you want the Windows partition for is gaming you should be damned happy to have Starter By having Starter over HP you probably saved a good chunk of time having to kill the features that would be useless for gaming, like WMP media sharing along with Aero and the other bling bling bells and whistles. Personally I wish MSFT would sell Starter retail for say $35, I'd be buying copies of it like it were going out of style! It would be perfect for older/slower hardware, for SOHOs and other places where you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can run your programs. Why all the hatred for a bloat free MSFT OS I'll never know, but personally I'd be damned glad to have all the copies of it I could get my hands on.

As for TFA it beats the Atom and that's all that matters to me. Anybody who has had to work on Atom machines knows with normal desktop usage they can quickly and easily get bogged down, especially if they are the non ION variety, so hopefully there will be plenty of models based around these chips so I can steer my customers clear of the suckfest that is Atom. The Radeon GPU should make video and flash nice and unskippy, and paired with Win7 Starter should make for a nice light little netbook with decent battery life and decent performance without breaking the wallet. Sounds good to me and I'll have to look into one of these for my GF's BDay a couple of months from now, sounds perfect for a little purse sized netbook she can take with her on the family camping trips.

And how many of us actually read those opt-in agreements when we use software?
Opt-in consent to this electronic eavesdropping is, essentially, meaningless. If the agreement contained a provision where you granted them permission to watch over your shoulder when keying in your PIN at the ATM, you'd click it in order to go on using the software. Heck, people will even give up their passwords for chocolate.

Ummm. They are. Facebook surpasses Google as the Internet's top dog

It's a safe assumption.

Actually, it's probably a safe assumption that this is just a way to extract $1.3 billion of funding out of the EU in order to pay for a bunch of supercomputers and interdisciplinary research. It's apparently part of something called FuturICT, a submission to the EU's Flagships initiative, which is to say that it is meant to be ambitious - here a codeword for 'infinitely improbable'. FET Flagships are long term initiatives on a budget of around 100 M€ Euros per year.

You can get a copy of the proposal from here. It's a bunch of hand-wavy maybes. Most of the proposal is taken up with the interesting observation that knowing stuff about stuff is a prerequisite to revolutionising education, understanding and fixing the world economy, identifying financial crises before they happen, identifying innovations before they catch on, solving transport problems, creating a whole new scientific paradigm ('science 2.0'), fixing energy consumption and making us all safer. However, they have letters of support from George Soros and various other luminaries, so presumably the EU will assume (or already assumed) that they know what they are talking about.

I love to see these guys fail.

It failed? I thought it was a big success? Maybe they should have built a few more??

An article I found says

"Like Halliburton in the previous administration, Google has an exceptionally close relationship with the [Obama White House]," NLPC Chariman Kenneth Boehm wrote in a letter to the House obtained by The Hill.

Google's relationship with the Obama administration is nothing like Cheney and Halliburton. I mean, has Biden or Obama held large amounts of Google stock like Cheney and Bush held stock in Halliburton?

I don't remember anybody calling for an investigantion into Cheney and Halliburton during the Bush administration.

This is more like the Bush ties to Microsoft; the Bush Justice Department pretty much let MS off the hook after Clinton had them by the balls. I didn't see any investigantions into that, either.

This smells to me like nothing more than dirty politics; kind of like Clinton's forty million dollar blow job.

The real trick has always been the interconnects & the software that gets those thousands of C/GPUs talking to each other.

Yes, this is spot on for massively parallel systems. The interesting thing is that China does actually make their own interconnects, but they aren't so great. The Tianhe-1 actually runs at 47% of the theoretical capacity. In contrast, the previous number 1 (Jaguar) runs at about 76%. In fact, China's previous big HPC was Nebulae, which had a higher theoretical peak than Jaguar, but didn't actually perform faster because of interconnects problem.

The Xbox 360 is a fantastic product? So you've never owned one have you?

RROD pops to mind and the overall 16.1% failure rate over 6 to 10 months use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems
http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-features/36070-report-xbox-360-failure-rate-above-15

Plus the fact that it didn't support an HD format for games, no Blu-ray support now, no Bluetooth support, it's not that fantastic of a device.

Sure, right after the TRON light cycle is released.

Oh, wait a minute!

Maybe it's for a 'Receiver having concealed antenna that suffers poor reception when held the wrong way'?? That would be a little more specific (and a touch less obvious) ;-)

Good thing that Apple avoided that with the iPhone 4 then.

In denial are we?

Falcon

Gee, why did I know that there would be at least one Apple Hater who couldn't help but show us that he doesn't know what "concealed" menas. Somebody should mod you up "Insightful", because that's what your little post is.

Maybe it's for a 'Receiver having concealed antenna that suffers poor reception when held the wrong way'?? That would be a little more specific (and a touch less obvious) ;-)

Good thing that Apple avoided that with the iPhone 4 then.

In denial are we?

Falcon

Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation. They've also reassigned Richard Rabbat to Redmond, which will probably be quite a surprise to him.

Meanwhile, in 2016 when the IE team gets around to implementing this image format they'll find a way to put an exploitable buffer overflow into it.

You compare apples to oranges here. When I need a phone, I first look out for the phone itself then the service provider. Others may look at the carrier first. Can you say Android has done miserably so far? No!

On the other hand, when I am looking for a computer system, I look at the applications available, ease of use then the support. In this department, Linux is still wanting.

Google should stay the course with its Android licensing regime. It gives us choice...much deeper than anything otherwise. Just recently, LG launched entry level Android phones. This would be an after thought if it were not for Android's licensing regime.

The strategy for ARM to address more than 4 GiB RAM is called LPAE and it is as hackish as it sounds.

Duke Nukem Forever is real and will be coming out for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/51395-holy-crap-duke-nukem-forever-gets-a-release-date-window

It is a relatively minor technical glitch.

It's more than just a "relatively minor technical glitch" and has been since Apple and Jobs stated there was no problem. Steve Jobs went so far as to tell one person who had trouble with his own iPhone "You are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down. You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength". He tells the person to relax, it's just a phone, then says to get a life.

If Jobs and Apple had never said there was no problem and that it was just rumors, it would have stayed a technical glitch, but they didn't.

Falcon

Oh, and in case readers then I'm saying this because I'm an Apple basher I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro which I think is great. I got it after switching from Windows PC which I bought and used for almost 10 years.

It may have an effect. Especially after the comments Steve Jobs told one iPhone owner.

Steve Jobs tells angry iPhone 4 owner to "relax". Steve Jobs told an owner who posted a video of his problem on YouTube "No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down." Get a Life..

Falcon

I think I heard this a couple months ago. No Flash, either.

TG Daily says it's half baked. "Wasn't booting at all."

But at least there's hope for the people who want yet another Windows 7 tablet. Both of them should be real happy with this - next year. Neither tablet will be ready this year.

I might also be a lighting effect related to the Sun's position, our position and possibly other space phenomenons (magnetic fields, etc). If one looks at both pictures on the link below, we can see that the belt is still there, it is only much less visible. Remember that those belts are gases that could be more sensible to these types of effects.

http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/49737-one-of-jupiters-belts-disappears

At first, I also thought about the belt being on the hidden side of the planet but Jupiter has got a rotation period of about half a day so we should have noticed this already if it was the case ;-)

Dell seems to have realized http://www.androidcentral.com/dell-looking-glass-tablet-tegra-2-love a lot earlier that Windows 7 would not be responsive enough on a slow processor and made the conscious and responsible move towards an alternative OS before HP. It has taken HP months of tests to realize that an Atom CPU and Win7 aren't a match made in heaven. They even posted videos on their YouTube channel recently! HP should either upgrade the Slate's CPU and stick with Win7 -- which would give them a larger-than-life ecosystem -- or they should go with Android, which, not only is open, but it's also growing in popularity at a great pace http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49518-android-market-hits-50k-app-mark/.

One area that we're seeing PCs move more towards is actual 3D gaming, with special glasses and everything. The next generation consoles might be able to do that, but the current generation is SOL.

Are they really now?

http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/49470-sony-details-ps3-3d-firmware-update

Not just the summary. The article itself is misleading (it doesn't once mention that the virus effects Windows PCs and not iPads). This one: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49519-nefarious-ipad-virus-masquerades-as-itunes-update is slightly better, as it doesn't fail to mention the fact that Windows PCs are being infected and not iPads. The iPad is only the phishing-hook to get a user to click the link (something like: you need to update your iTunes for your new iPad, click here to do so...)

TGDaily has an interesting take on it related to Shimon Peres' son who is the Apple distributor:

http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49387-why-israel-banned-the-ipad

Indeed, it is worth noting that Apple's Israeli distributor, iDigital, is run by Chemi Peres, the hyper-entrepreneurial son of Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Clearly, iDigital wants its lucrative cut of every iPad brought into the country - which it will undoubtedly receive when a modified European version of the iPad is approved for import over the next two or three months.

But in the meantime, iDigital can't make money off the slow trickle of iPads entering the country via private citizens, tourists and international businessmen.

And if iDigital can't get its cut, well, then, no iPad for you!

I have citations for everything you asked for, and then a few more:

Wear-leveling is done for bad sectors on a HDD, not as standard practice.

1) I still was considering that wear-leveling. Just after-the-fact wear leveling. :-)
2) However, Western Digital drives do have "Preemptive wear leveling" as a standard practice.

Wrong. I just ran a benchmark and...

On a HDD, writes are followed by an immediate read to verify the data wrote correctly. Take a look at some of the benchmarks on storagereview.com Compare the random writes to random reads: the writes are always slower. StorageReview doesn't compare continuous writes, because that is rare. However, you will find that there are drives specially designed for continuous writes for A/V purposes, that are made to address this issue.

Try to defrag a MLC drive a few times and it'll be dead in a week

My turn. [citation needed]. I'll provide my own references.
According to Kingston

For USB Flash drives, Toshiba calculated that a 10,000 write cycle endurance would enable
customers to “completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years well beyond the life of the hardware.”

Intel was more conservative with their report

...the X-18/25 SSDs have a mean time before failure (MTBF) rating of 1.2 million hours, which is on par with modern server hard drives. In addition, he claimed that the drives can withstand a workload of 100 GB worth of writes a day for five years.

They then go on to explain how it was actually hard to even write 100GB per day.

not degradation of the media itself.

Magnetic media does degrade. For one thing, it warps over time. I can't state all of the methods of failure.

Look, SSDs are great... But they are not ready to replace HDDs.

I agree. Just not for some of the reasons the Wikipedia article lists.

TG Daily claims that the Secret Service uses a IBM 704

I'm confused, here. What are you talking about that most games up till now were consoles? People were playing games on computers before atari existed. Secondly, there are not many console exclusive titles. The only stuff that does that really is sports games. Of course people who bought consoles are supposedly only doing it for gaming, although that would be a lie, not a fact. Especially in comparison to that many people bought PS3 for bluray playback capability as well.

Intel GMA has the markethold because it is the cheapest bottom rung product (and the first) which is also tied into many laptops by default. Want the cheapest laptop? Intel GMA. Want one that even play video? Not Intel GMA. A typical PC user can play whatever they want, but to state that all they play is facebook or casual games is disingenuous to the entire gaming industry. Integrated graphics doesn't account for even remotely what you assume, either. From my first google result for "marketshare of intel graphics" I see: http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/43383-amd-eats-into-nvidia-intel-graphics-market-share . Suffice to say, if 90% was integrated graphics, not only PC but Console gaming would suffer too - as it's the same companies that make the graphics capability for both.

What does it say? Intel at best has 50%. Where does Nvidia's 30% come from, huh? So integrated graphics doesn't account for 90% of the machines. Hell, even netbooks come with discrete graphics cards.

I personally would prefer it if computers were stong enough to calculate a photon hitting a material, reflecting its non-absorbed light into a "camera" object in game and taking the rendered picture and sending it to the monitor, thus creating a more realistic lighting effect, but we just aren't there yet.

Already been done. It's called ray tracing, and does exactly what you describe (except the other way around -- it traces light rays in reverse from the camera to the light source).

The trouble with ray tracing is that while it looks absolutely beautiful and stunningly realistic it's extremely impractical to do in real time. It can be done, but only with a supercomputer.

I've heard of some game engines being adapted to use ray tracing algorithms (here's a hacked up Quake 3 that apparently does so, but doesn't look any better than the original game). Here's an interesting interview with an Intel dude talking about it. In terms of actual usability though, there's no way you're going to actually play any of those games yet.

Yet.

In any case, what we can say is that Apple is planning to sell up to 10 million of this initial run, which will presumably be manufactured over the calendar year 2010, if they are going to be available for quantity shipments in March.

If it follows the formula for the iPhone and iPod, there will probably be some scarcity through summer as significant defects will be found and corrected. In late summer, in time for school, there will be like a minor revision and then sales will pick up considerable. I can see them selling a couple million by mid summer, then 3 million or so for back to school, and the rest for christmas.

I will have to see the product to decide when to buy it. If it is a small screen, 7", for under $500, it might be nice to have it in the near term. If it is much more expensive, which would be likely for 10" model, then it would worth waiting for the version that will actually work.

AT least the kids are protected from cosmic rays http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44139/184/

OS X is UNIX, a server OS, so I fail to see what your issue is with the idea of OS X used as a server.

Microsoft has been aiming towards high-performance computing recently, working with companies like Nvidia. If you are going to have racks and racks of CPU's/GPU's, it would make sense to have everything accessible using a single memory space.

The main point of a patent is to give the inventor a chance to recover the development costs and make a profit from their hard work before anybody else is allowed to copy them. If you think that this can be done in such a short time, you have a very simplistic idea of the costs of research and development.

Alright, let's do some calculations, shall we?

Source.

The 16GB iPhone 3GS only costs the company three percent more to make than last year's model, with a bill of materials totalling $172.46 plus $6.50 in manufacturing costs, says the company.

Apple's US carrier, AT&T, sells the 16GB iPhone 3GS at a subsidized $199, but industry watchers reckon that AT&T and other carriers cough up around $600 per phone. In the UK, Apple's carrier of choice, O2, sells a pay as you go 16GB iPhone 3GS for a whopping $719.85.

Apple claims it sold a million iPhone 3GS phones in the three days following its launch, which would equate to a cool $420 million profit if iSuppli's numbers are accurate.

And how about the cost of R&D?

In absolute terms, Appleâ(TM)s R&D investment is up $59 million in Q4 2005 over Q4 2004. For all we know this might be a good, sustainable R&D investment rate for them.

Assuming that's per quarter, that means that exactly one model of iPhone, in exactly three days, paid for Apple's entire R&D budget for over a year and a half -- "entire" meaning "not limited to iPhones".

Now, not everything's an iPhone, but you see the point -- from the first public release of a product to a profit doesn't have to take a long time. In cases where it does, chances are the inventor's doing something wrong, and deserve to lose their protection.

In either case, notice again that competition doesn't necessarily kill the device in question, nor do cheap imitators actually prevent innovation.

Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.

Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.

So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.

Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.

Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.

you want voices in the scientific community who say the science is far from settled?
MIT scientists: Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at the political cry of "alarming rates."
American Physicists
31,478 scientists, including 9029 PHD's reject global warming

Can a lawyer ever give a definitive answer?
A appeals court yesterday overturned the assignment of UNIX to NOVELL giving SCO clearance to sue IBM for billions. I'd imagine the android handset makers and most linux-based router makers have reasons to be nervous as well. SCO also has a new deep pocket backing it's legal team. it's on again!.
I doubt even lawyer could really give you a definitive answer on licensing.

I thought the way they sell so many is mainly due to the up-front cost. Most people apparently want a PS3 with its bluray, easy going attitude to upgrades, free online play etc. If it was cheaper - and it now is - then more than twice as many would prefer it.

Amazon has restricted supply of the PS3 slim already, Marketshare for the PS is surely going to rise at the expense of the Xbox now.

Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper?

.

Maybe, but not by much - reports suggest the Atom costs less than $10 to manufacture. At that price any savings between processor types is pretty tiny unless you're deploying a vast number of them.

There's so much x86 development though, I'd imagine x86, and especially windows programmers, are much easier to find and cost less to hire. The processor cost in a POS system is going to be a tiny fraction of the total when you add in touch screens, bar code scanners, cash drawers, scales etc etc.

From the manufacturer's point of view it can probably develop software faster and cheaper using .net and it's that saving that probably drives lots of x86 uptake in these sorts of devices.

I'm sure that sort of thing gets lost/dumpster dived/hacked/inside-jobbed from time to time

oh it sure does. and it leads to beatings and suicide.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/43340/95/

# Microsoft says the Xbox 360 can do 1 teraflops
# Sony says the PS3 can do about 2 teraflops

so, who has more power? for a real-world comparison (like you said, marketing teams suck) here's an article from tgdaily: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37621/128/

developers never said the 360 has more power. they said it's easier to develop for.

Would I have to pay royalties to MPEG LA to watch MPEG-2 encoded media on VLC media player

Apple, for example, has reported problems: MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues.

Quote: "In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected."

Here are two lawsuits alleging that Nvidia was dishonest:

Nvidia asked to pay up for defective chips
Quote: '... accuses Nvidia of a series of misrepresentations and omissions that "actively concealed and failed to disclose the unusually high failure rates of Nvidia's mobile video adapters...'

Nvidia hit with second suit over defective GPUs
Quote: '... Nvidia issued a "series of materially false statements that concealed and failed to disclose" unusually high failure rates...'

Apple, for example, has reported problems: MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues.

Quote: "In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected."

Here are two lawsuits alleging that Nvidia was dishonest:

Nvidia asked to pay up for defective chips
Quote: '... accuses Nvidia of a series of misrepresentations and omissions that "actively concealed and failed to disclose the unusually high failure rates of Nvidia's mobile video adapters...'

Nvidia hit with second suit over defective GPUs
Quote: '... Nvidia issued a "series of materially false statements that concealed and failed to disclose" unusually high failure rates...'

I suppose it's all relative -- but compared to some of the crazy stuff coming out, it seems pretty small.

I was about to dismiss it as unsubstantiated speculation, but I just saw an article claiming that Apple may want to acquire EA. That would fit in VERY nicely with designing their own game console, which I imagine would replace AppleTV.

Wow. Apple buying Twitter would be silly, but Apple buying EA could totally change the landscape.

I am not convinced that switching to a MIPS CPU would make that much difference. An entry level Atom CPU starts at $20 or $45 including chipset [2], so the price of an atom is smallish even in a comparison to the price of the $250 netbook. Depending on the atom in question, the atom may take up to 2.5 watts at 100% CPU usage, about as much as a single desktop DIMM of ram, much less than the 28W a 10" monitor could draw [3]. A low power atom would draw just 0.65 watt [2]. It seems that one you start looking at a machine with decent specs, you'll want to spend a few extra dollars and a couple of extra watts (up to 1W idle [1]) to get an Atom that has double [1] the performance of the fastest ARM11 based CPU.

[1] http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20080529/152586/
[2] http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36795/118/
[3] http://www.planetomni.com/MSLCD_SHRP_lc-10a2ubp_DTL.shtml

Google tells users to drop IE6
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40785/140/

I heard it on the radio, but here's a site that confirms the story: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42055/103/

True, but that's changing: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41581/113/