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In the cold war the united states did this several times to the USSR, one notable example was a gas pipeline explosion caused by a specifically sabotaged piece of software.

Here is an article detailing the event;
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm

The USSR attempted in several instances to steal or otherwise acquire technology from the united states, and whenever this was detected our counter-intelligence services would provide flawed or otherwise sabotaged technology in place of the actual information sought. This had the desired cascading effect of the USSR unable to trust any technology that may have been introduced from non-USSR sources and was considered an extremely significant part of the eventual collapse of the USSR.

Thats ignoring the lies. I'm sick of seeing myths about Linux articles http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10014283o-2000498448b,00.htm from yesterday. I'm sick that nobody is ALLOWED to tell the truth 60% of Microsoft machines are infected with malware and growing http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10363373-83.html secure. Its the drivers; its the 3rd party application. Please its the damn OS.

Windows 7 launched to the starved of an upgrade...Does it include IE*/WMP/Filemanager and an AD supported word/office crapware, with a restore partition instead of a disc. Then I wont be buying it. Will it work on the machines in my house! No! Does it still require Activation; Contain DRM(See BBC announcments); Overreaching EULA thats anti consumer as opposed to GPL; Activation; WGA/OGA; Lock me out of sharing with other OS's that I use and getting worse. Do I have to take a morning out of my life every 6 months to update; remove crap, and fine tune to keep it working. If the answer is yes then I'm not buying it.

I chose a Linux OS to install a hard 160GB hard drive that Windows98 could not handle, and as a computer professional I didn't care which. I just used copy of Linux from a magazine and I see Lies; propaganda; ignorance; insults in return for Liking the Killer feature...and that is the this article; the UPGRADE BUTTON. I don't wait 3-7 years for an upgrade to OS+DESKTOP+APPS its every day with a large update every 6 months that genuinely brings features+stability+improvement+wow for NIL cost not updates to Applications I wouldn't dream of using on any platform+company pushing its own agenda+or increased restrictions.

How about you stick to talking about technology instead of spouting false love and unity!

well good thing we're devious bastards when we need to be.

i'd be careful stealing our tech....

What is it with high-profile open source projects trying to emulate Microsoft blunders, is it a sort of status thing? Firefox can give us ribbons, Open Office has Clippy what next?

I too am nostalgic for the return of this OS. It was amazing! I had a Pentium II 400mhz (fast at the time) and was astounded at how much quicker BeOS did everything than windows, linux, OS9 or anything else at the time. If apple hadn't killed the clones or Microsoft hadn't threatened the hardware vendors the computing landscape today would be very different.

For anyone who is interested in why be failed: here is an article about the lawsuit that they filed against Microsoft which was later won for 23 million, but it was too little too late. Microsoft essentially told HP, Dell and others that if they even offered BeOS as an option then they wouldn't sell them licensing and they would be forced to purchase retail licenses for windows. None of the big manufacturers was willing to take that big of a gamble, so they were forced into bankruptcy.

Well, there's exFAT - a patented filesystem supported natively in windows 7 and vista, that supports 64ZiB instead of the 8TiB FAT32 supports, and has ACL support (win 7/2008R2 only tho), with a max filesize of 127PiB.

OK, it's patented and proprietary, but so is FAT32 and NTFS, it's just what you have to put up with dealing with windows.

Also, the company behind NTFS-3G has recently signed a licence agreement with Microsoft in order to provide a commercial exFAT implementation for linux OEMs.

Headline: Microsoft puts Windows source code into public domain!

When that happens, let me know. Until then, let's put that strawman away.

Gosh golly - where do you think Slashdot gets the idea that Microsoft might use patents as a weapon? Certainly not from anything Microsoft's leaders have said. I mean, it's not like there's a history. This is just irrational hatred for a successful company competing "the old fashioned way." Its got nothing to do with reaping what you sow.

People in the "secure" market have phones. The thing all phones have in common is that they can all be hacked; doesn't matter whether its an IPhone or a BB if someone wants your information, they can get it. It doesn't matter who writes the encryption, there's always someone better who will crack it.

No, the difference is there might be someone who can crack a BlackBerry with encryption enabled, but there's no widely known attack that doesn't require 256-bit AES to be cracked... whereas anyone who wishes to crack an iPhone with encryption enabled can do so without too much trouble.

But none of the other smartphone platforms have had an exploit quite as bad as the Android's root console bug.

Yeah, but the government has a history of leaving this data on trains, mailed second class between offices through Royal Mail, or dumped in a stack of boxes on a roundabout in Devon

Oh, and sent to Ireland by the DVLA where again, it is promptly lost.

Sorry I am UK so made assumptions based on that - afaik nobody (major) uses Deep packet Inspection here yet. People have been dropping Phorm trials for the hot potato it is.

Once they do though (I see virgin still seem to be on board, which is worrying to me as cable is the only decent choice in the uk imho) then the users move to the next level (they already know how, but why bother when simple port 80 stuff works for now) ...

http://www.inputoutput.io/how-to-subvert-deep-packet-inspection-the-right-way/

I agree the ISP's will react in time, but my money is on the community moving faster than the ISPs. (look at how CSS, AACS and DRM in general is working out...)

I think the real answer (from ISP's) is legal downloadable media content with a compelling price. Convenience is the huge elephant in the room that media providers seem intent on ignoring. Yes, there will always be freeloaders but there are a huge swathe of people who would quite happily pay for the convenience of not having to trawl binsearch or tpb for the content they want.

There is a quite significant market in reasonably priced 'authorised' downloadable content (itunes, virgin on demand, sky box office etc) which proves the model works.

Cost of delivery vs price? The potential margin must be huge. At least comparable to that of physical media. if ISP's cache content locally they are laughing. If I was an ISP with a fat network that already had a content delivery arm (oh yes thats right Virgin) then I would set up my own 'iPlayer' knock off, I know - vPlayer.

I have a hunch that bandwidth costs (From p2p at least) would be slashed, as everyone would just get the content of your own servers.

Meh, I'm rambling now.

The original site seems to be gone, but a privacy group raised these issues when the bill was under consideration (story)

As I understand it from this ZDnet article, Adam Laurie removed the DG14 certificate. This blog post ties in with that, and the idea that cards' authenticity can be checked on-line (at a cost of £2 per check) or offline. Without the DG14 certificate, the on-line check would fail, as you state, but the offline check will pass. Offline checks are necessary for scalability when you expect 70 million cards in circulation, each performing at least a few "low-security" transactions every day, but introduce obvious potential security problems.

Supposedly both (check last paragraph)

The other attack was the campaign against vendors selling naked PC's.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39286228,00.htm/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/23/ms_how_pcs_shipped_without/
http://www.linfo.org/naked_pc.html/

They just sued.

No they didn't. They filed a Antitrust complaint, big difference.

http://www.css3.info/opera-files-antitrust-complaint-against-microsoft/

However, Opera have in the past threatened to sue Microsoft a but Microsoft settled before it ever reached court.

The background to the suit were that if you visited the MSN website with Opera identifying itself as Opera you got served a broken web page, this is what lead Opera to introduce the feature of identifying itself as other browsers. The reason for this change were that if visiting the very same site with the very same version of Opera but identifying as IE the page displayed correctly!

A fact that unfortunately is omitted in the below article, but I'm sure you are capable of doing the research yourself in the case you don't bellieve me.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39155572,00.htm

What I love about slashdot is its scalability. The discussion ranges anywhere from the design of a Google data center in 2015 to some guy's psychological stance toward his next netbook purchase in 2009. Sometimes it's unclear which end of the spectrum is under debate, but the discussion happily progresses in a state of astral superposition. When this gets too confusing, even for slashdot, the moderation system helps to sort things out. For example, if the comment

Flash memory is set to replace rotational media.

is moderated +1 insightful, then we know we're talking about some guy's future netbook purchase. Or if the same comment is moderated -1 troll, then we know we're talking about Google data centers in 2015.

Flash memory begins to fade - ZDNet.co.uk from 2005

"The scaling laws are not favourable to flash," said Tom Lee, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a founder of Matrix Semiconductor, which makes a 3D memory chip that performs flash-like functions. "The noises are getting louder now, so it looks like manufacturers are already in that new age of diminished gains."

Numonyx Breakthrough Delivers First 45nm NOR Flash Memory Chips from Jan 2009

"Numonyx engineers overcame major scaling limitations by developing new process techniques to produce the 7th generation MLC NOR flash on the industry's most advanced 45nm technology, and to be the first to bring the cost and performance benefits to our customers."
...
"At a time when the entire industry grapples with the scalability of all flash memory technologies, ..."

Brewster Kahle

I think Brewster Kahle is going to jump off a bridge when he learns that Seagate is exiting the disk drive business in 2010. If you think CERN or EOS cost a lot of money, try updating the budget with SSD specified as the primary storage layer.

A useful way to view this transition is the long tail on steroids. 99% of the world's stored information will be held by a few hundred mega-scale institutions (NASA, Google, CERN, GenBank) on rotating hard drives, while 99% of the world's gadgets have no hard drive at all.

The same thing happened in software. The C language represents a tiny sliver of source code written over the last ten years, but if you could measure the number of machine instructions executed by language of origin, C would continue to represent a very large slice of the pie. A major factor in the success of scripting languages is that the problems these languages don't handle well can be off-loaded to a well established compiled language. If you cherry pick your niche, it's amazing how much more convenient it looks compared to the ancestral technology which didn't.

I thought the paper was quite good, and more relevant than 99% of what I read these days. I'm always interested in analysis of hybrid solutions. In the engineering world, there is a de facto allergy to hybrid solutions. We tend to achieve the best result by scaling a single virtue to the max, rather than engaging in the jello-like trade-offs involved in balancing complementary virtues. I first began to think about this when ethernet trounced ATM by the simple measure of vastly over-provisioning bandwidth.

The exception to this is on the large scale where operational costs exceed all other costs, such as major data centers.

This is one of the reasons why progress in ecology is so painfully achieved: ecological systems almost always demand hybrid solutions, and we're not terribly comfortable with this. Engineers prefer monarchy. In ecological systems, life is complicated, and you can't just sit there and

There was also the SlugBot..

No one said Linux is "bulletproof". Don't try to change the topic.

TFA is saying that the closed-source software costs more when operating costs are included in the total price tag. How much does industry pay for malware protection, virus protection, trojan protection, downtime from infection, and loss of productivity as a result of closed-source software? Those costs are relevant to businesses and should be considered.

What the hell does 'closed-source' software have to do with malware and all things you listed? Those depend more on popularity than FOSS or not. For example, check FireFox 'infected' with spyware http://i.d.com.com/i/dl/media/dlimage/14/92/50/149250_large.jpeg

Debian servers attacked http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39118062,00.htm

"This is a very unfortunate incident to report about. Some Debian servers were found to have been compromised in the last 24 hours," the posting read.

Attackers compromised four servers, including those responsible for maintaining the project's bug tracking system, mailing lists, Web, Common Versioning System (CVS), security downloads and others.

RedHat/Fedora itself being attacked http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150212/hackers_crack_into_red_hat.html

The last two examples are almost the equivalent of Windows Update being attacked and distributing malware, which hasn't happened (yet).

How can you claim that 'closed-source software' is the cause of all the ills you mentioned?

China mandated micro-USB charging sockets in December 2006, so the EU is just falling in line. Yawn.

And South Korea did so a year earlier.

Maybe with EU on board we'll see handsets for the US market meeting the standard without having to wait forever while the US carriers get their shit together.

China mandated micro-USB charging sockets in December 2006, so the EU is just falling in line. Yawn.

Nearly everyone pays for Windows... I remember when I was jaded too (in college) and thought a lot of people pirated Windows. But it's more like just 12%, almost all of which are younger people, especially college students.

As you pointed out, it comes pre-loaded on machines, so that's how a lot of people get it. But it's not like they're suckers, nor are the people who actually pay for new versions and upgrades.

I buy Windows, and I also paid for Office 2007 Ultimate. Yeah, I could have torrented it, but you know what? Being able to write my term papers without worrying about new updates or WGA routes disabling features in either my OS or my document-writing program of choice. I know that I have the most up-to-date software, with no hassle, no registry hacks, and no waiting around for hacking updates.

Then of course there's businesses. They nearly always buy their OSes for obvious reasons.

I wonder if one or any of these is "extensible":

http://www.sql-ledger.org/cgi-bin/nav.pl?page=features.html&title=Features

http://chasesagum.com/open-source-payroll-time-management

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39175137,00.htm

Even in:

http://www.compiere.com/industries/

I don't see "Education/Universities/Distributed Academic Education Systems"

and what happened to those billions of pounds raised by selling off the 3g spectrum? did it all go on MPs expenses?

No, it went on paying off the national debt.
A great move IMO, but one which economists got in a tizz about for some reason.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,2086122,00.htm

I think Silverlight is possibly a good thing, if not only because even in the worst case it forces Adobe to make Flash a better product.

I definitely do agree with you here but Microsoft has a history of making sure their product is that much better than their competition by just withholding information. They are not supposed to do this now but US justice won't do much unless the act is ridiculously blatant and while the EU will prosecute Microsoft it takes time for the case to be raised, tried and a verdict handed down. Even if Microsoft do loose to litigation the fines imposed are small change compared to the advantages they have already received. Microsoft as a corporate entity know this and are quite happy to bend the rules even if it means substantial fines down the time track.

It must be noted that Microsoft does not break the Law of the country they work in, in fact they go out of their way not to. Bend or skirt close to being illegal yes (ethics means nothing to business although many do pay lip service to them) but from their corporate perspective this is their way of doing business. The reason for this is if you break a countries laws then individual people start facing jail terms and this is the last think Microsoft wants no matter how much of an advantage this would give them, because then they become a very big target for litigation.

Having fun with your friends.

I get it.

But it's a massive, massive downgrade from IRC and Usenet.

It's like hanging out on the internet for people who were too stupid to even qualify as AOL users from the March of '94 to November of '98 era.

In the UK, yes. You'll be required to hand over your encryption keys to the government. If you refuse, it's 2-5 years, depending whether or not you're a "terrorist suspect." I wouldn't surprised if refusing makes you a terrorist suspect mighty quickly.

But they do make their own motherboards, they make their own cooling solutions, they often meticulously design power supplies to be quiet, they will often times design the battery. They design the cases to be sturdy, have excellent heat conduction and they are quiet.

Actually, Intel builds their motherboards for for Apple http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39244663,00.htm

While the data on the USB stick was encrypted, the password to access the data was attached to the drive on a Post-it note, a Central Lancashire Primary Care Trust (PCT) spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Monday.

Wait a second... I thought I saw that guy earlier:

From a previous article.

From this article.

And no, I don't read the articles, I just look at the pictures.

They made mod chips illegal in the UK back in 2004, though they are legal in Spain and Italy.

Phillip.

Sun bought "Afara Websystems" which were designing it. Sun finished the design. See for example
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39154430,00.htm

But all the articles I could find say it was a sparc chip, even before sun bought the company. This is strange because I remember reading a long
article about how the chip designers developing niagara were unhappy because sun changed the instruction set for the processor from x86-64 to sparc. (But they could at least keep using their current tools, even if it was not the tools that sun normally used to design chips).
But maybe someone(Me??) mixed up chip names.

And there might not be room for an other x86-64 player, but I think there are more room there then in the sparc space.
So I think a x86-64 Niagra+transitives sparc->x86 emulator would make a winner because sun could recover some of the extra costs by selling of excess Niagara chips. (Something that is really difficult as long as they are sparc).

But we will newer know.
 

Now that was a chip that shook the world.
The Soviets shopped around for automated pipeline software.
The US gov provided just what they needed.
Computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.
"to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39147917,00.htm

No wait, make that 2000.

Don't jump to your guns and proclaim ESR's clairvoyant genius, though. In 2000, he said to LWN "I believe that will happen probably within five to six month from now." I hope for his sake he didn't sit and wait it out...

This will only create more business opportunities for other people to sell what Amazon doesn't. The barrier of entry into book selling online is very low. Everyone who whines and screams right now should be registering domains and dusting their LAMPs off.

Damn straight. This is America. We don't have an oppressive government, right? When one major corporate vendor drops you, you just pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and start a new store yourself. "Find a need and fill it," as Henry Ford and Ron Jeremy would no doubt agree.

So I'll just crank up my Linux/Apache skills and launch a storefront for erotica and other adult content, just like you're saying. Never mind Amazon Payments, I'll accept PayPal instead, and... wait, what?

You mean that any sufficiently-entrenched oligopoly is indistinguishable from an oppressive government?

Who would'a thunk it?

Retired? Really? Not a week ago. He may have given the CEO reins over to our favorite chair tosser, but he's still Chairman of Microsoft. No doubt his stock option package is quite good.

That's good for Microsoft, too. Three nines of companies don't long survive the loss of their founders. As Damon Runyon said, "The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet".

The fall may have even begun before he retired as CEO. When SCO's backstop with Baystar dried up, Microsoft lost all of its credibility in the smoke filled rooms where the real money makes deals. Who knows how much this cost RBC and the other partners? Gates will spend the rest of his life trying to make amends, but those who suffered will never forget. You can't swing a billion dollars without somebody dies, and the dead stay dead no matter how many soup kitchens you volunteer in afterward.

Eventually, pigeons come home to roost. The devil will have his due.

More likely he'll pay EDS 98 squillion gazillion quid to mod it.

After they've finished (with a 200% time and 300% budget overrun) it won't play DVDs from any region. But look on the bright side, it will make lovely toast.

Should be -1 Troll.

Wow, nobody has any sense of humor today....

as Microsoft has a well paid legal team at their disposal which would most likely prevent unauthorized usage of patented ideas.

Yeah, when would Microsoft ever violate patents?

Sounds like a response to Android, but a little late.

Other than install base for phones, what advantage does an opensourced Symbian have over Android?

There were rumors of Android and Symbian merging for a while, but it seems as though Symbian has taken to cheap heckling.

Yeah they paid £6k of public money to known criminals and knowingly broke the law for the sake of some sensationalist journalism .. what's not to like?

So the researchers at the BBC are allowed to break the law (and spend public money doing it) but other people who're "investigating" computers that don't belong to them get extradited? [ http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39619206,00.htm ]

I'm not saying McKinnon is blameless incidentally.

I don't care who's cracking someone's computer or controlling a botnet, it's wrong and they should be punished for it.

Does it cost 20%-30% more when a EU resident downloads an Adobe product form their store than if a US resident does the same? I don't think so.

I don't think so either: Photoshop CS4 costs $699.00 in the US for direct download from Adobe, or EUR 887.12, the equivalent of $1115.00. That's considerably more than 30%. The VAT accounts for about EUR 110 of the difference, tho'.

ZDNet (God, I hate referring to ZDNet) did an article on the pricing imbalance last year. A 50% premium for products in Europe seems t'be standard for them.

Most other companies charge more for downloadable software in Europe than in the US, although the VAT generally accounts for most of the difference.

No, the blame lies with the Portuguese government agency that contracted to build the site but didn't impose a requirement that the developers not employ proprietary technologies that limit open access. I could build a fine procurement site with open-source technologies like PHP and PostgreSQL that would require nothing beyond a generic browser on the client side; I'm sure many others here could do so as well.

The last thing I could imagine doing is building such a site on graphics-heavy technologies like Silverlight or Flash.

If the Portuguese government hasn't heard about open access and open-source software, were their representatives just out of the room for the past half-dozen years during EU and EC pronouncements on these subjects?

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39289524,00.htm

"The spaghetti-like nightmare that forms many users' collection of phone chargers, headset connectors and data cables could be set to end after a major mobile industry forum agreed to standardise on one type of connector."

What else will we hear about?

"Universal charger for phones plan"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7894763.stm

"Mobile phone makers agree to create standard charger "
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090217/technology/spain_telecom_equip_technology_charger_consumer

Frankly, if I were a Vodafone exec in a country with a reputation "of torturing and murdering detainies, or having them 'disappear'" I'd probably cough up information pretty readily, too.

Not me. I would do everything in my power to undermine the country, much like the Western oil company's did in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez came to power. But too many people are like you; ready and willing to condone or take part in murder, torture and violence just like that bitch Annie Mullins from Vodophone, who

is heavily involved in various initiatives to prevent online child abuse, including the Internet Watch Foundation, added that the UK technology industry had "very positive" examples of self regulation.

(Ref: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39614610,00.htm). So she's actively involved in dubious organizations and thinks the UK police state is"very positive" and apparently expects people to take her seriously. The wrong people will inevitably, almost always get into positions of power. I only wish more of them were assassinated more often.

Take a look at the AES encryption speeds for the Nano though:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_ev_2.jpg

• 58,285 for the 1.8GHz Via Nano !!
• 9,294 for the 2.5GHz dual core Pentium
• 1,836 for the 1.6GHz Atom

From http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/components/0,1000001694,39613937-3,00.htm:

In the AES test, the Nano even outperforms the dual-core Pentium, and substantially so. In fact, with a score of 58,285, the Nano is faster than a Nehalem processor.

Specialized hardware helps!

Take a look at the AES encryption speeds for the Nano though:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_ev_2.jpg

• 58,285 for the 1.8GHz Via Nano !!
• 9,294 for the 2.5GHz dual core Pentium
• 1,836 for the 1.6GHz Atom

From http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/components/0,1000001694,39613937-3,00.htm:

In the AES test, the Nano even outperforms the dual-core Pentium, and substantially so. In fact, with a score of 58,285, the Nano is faster than a Nehalem processor.

Specialized hardware helps!

Wonder why those agencies are using such an "unsecure" platform...?

Me too.

DHS has been hacked
FBI has been hacked
Navy has been hacked
Air Force has been hacked.

It's interesting they didn't run any real crypto tests that actually, you know, *used* the Nano properly. The Nano comes with the Padlock engine built in, for hardware crypto. With Padlock-aware software running crypto, the Nano "spanks" Core 2 Quads with lots of welly and gives even Intel's i7 a run for its money.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_pwr.jpg

Why doesn't Intel get scored on IDLE power consumption? Who cares about MAXIMUM when idle is the state that most of these netbooks will be in. wtf?

I can tell you what the missing bar would look like: about 45 or 46W, 2-3W less than the full load measurement. ZDNet reviewed the D945GCFL Intel Atom desktop board, not an actual netbook. This is important: the D945GCFL is how Intel has found a way to sell an ancient chipset which uses far more power than the Atom CPU it's paired with. (If you've seen a picture of the board, you'll see one small fanless heatsink and one large one with a fan. The large one with a fan is for the chipset, not the CPU.)

Since that chipset's power draw doesn't vary much (it doesn't really have a low power mode), the CPU's swing of 4W between idle and full activity (the desktop version of the Atom is rated at just 4W TDP) doesn't make much difference in the total system power.

Nobody builds netbooks with that chipset because Intel has a much lower power chipset designed specifically for Atom netbooks. Any review which claims to compare the Atom and Nano for suitability as netbook processors and uses Intel's desktop Atom board as a basis for comparison is extremely suspect.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/rv/2009/01/netbooks_pwr.jpg

Why doesn't Intel get scored on IDLE power consumption? Who cares about MAXIMUM when idle is the state that most of these netbooks will be in. wtf?

Um, RTFA? 48W*1.5=72W, 68~=72.