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Parent is just copying post from a clever troll known as Jerry Lee Cooper.
See http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=43 or http://jerryleecooper.com/ for a best of.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to work with the (open source) speech recognition of IBM?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-5383536.html
or
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/13/1058241

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brian+reid+google&btnG=Google+Search

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9792046-7.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)

took me all of a minute to find that.

he's a marketing man and he is Director of GeekCorps.com which he likely sees OLPC as a competitor.
There is no conspiracy here, he's doing his job as a marketeer and chose to do so by negative 'campaign' tactics against the competition. He could have gone the other way created a site pushing positive attributes of his business and business partners but did not. he chose the tactics Intel themselves are using around the world to stop the OLPC project.

http://www.wayan.com/marketing.html

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595-6043635.html

LoB

The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN

SSID hiding: There is no such thing as "SSID hiding". You're only hiding SSID beaconing on the Access Point. There are 4 other mechanisms that also broadcast the SSID over the 2.4 or 5 GHz spectrum. The 4 mechanisms are; probe requests, probe responses, association requests, and re-association requests. Essentially, youre talking about hiding 1 of 5 SSID broadcast mechanisms. Nothing is hidden and all you've achieved is cause problems for Wi-Fi roaming when a client jumps from AP to AP. Hidden SSIDs also makes wireless LANs less user friendly. You dont need to take my word for it. Just ask Robert Moskowitz who is the Senior Technical Director of ICSA Labs in his white paper Debunking the myth of SSID hiding.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1096

According to a statement from a Microsoft spokesman:

"While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1096

There are industry estimates that say average code in production contains 2 bugs per thousand lines of code. Some say that number is much higher. How many lines do you think are in Vista?

Yes, OSS has bugs. Everything from compilers to content management systems, surely. So do proprietary programs.

The more qualified eyes you get on a bug, the better chance you have of finding and fixing it. You can do that by having a big staff that pores over code again and again. You can do it by having lots of outside help, like in the case of popular OSS projects. One thing that helps is to have a fresh set of eyes look over something, which is much easier in OSS that in closed-source applications.

BusinessWeek had an article from a guy at Coverity back in 2006 about this. In that article, Ben Chelf said that 4 of the top 15 programs on the quality scale measured by defects per thousand lines of code were OSS. He said that on average, the major-project OSS software they tested was indeed higher quality software than average. He said, though, that the absolute highest quality code was the cream-of-the-crop proprietary, closed source code from places that make things like fly-by-wire systems. Well, yeah. I'd want my airliner's fly-by-wire system completely bug-free, too.

Commercial software tends to harbor anywhere from 1 to 7 bugs per 1000 lines of code according to the National Cybersecurity Partnership's Working Group on the Software Lifecycle. Voluntary testing by Coverity requested (and probably paid for) by MySQL AB revealed that project to have all of 97 flaws, one of which could be a serious security issue. All 97 were to be fixed for the next release.

A similar study (same link) found 985 bugs in over 5,700,000 lines in the Linux kernel, or fewer than one bug per 10,000 lines of code. TFA has data on a newer version of the kernel -- 0.127 bugs per TLOC.

In Apache, 22 bugs total, 0.14 per TLOC, and three fixed so far.

PostgreSQL had 0.041 per TLOC, and have so far fixed 53 of the 90 bugs.

The glibc team fixed 83 of 83 bugs found.

OpenVPN had found one security-related bug in over 69,000 lines of code. As of later yesterday, it's officially security bug free according to the same testing people.

The list of officially security-bug free software includes Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL.

So with Linux (0.127), glibc (0.000), Apache (0.140), PostgresSQL (0.041), Perl (0.024), PHP (0.000), and Python (0.000) powering a web server (numbers according to Coverity), you have 0.0474 defects per thousand lines of code across the server. I'd say that's pretty good.

Do you mean this analysis? There's nothing there that contracts my assertion that DRM support in Windows Vista is minimal and opt-in!

As usual, the Slashdot community will jump any distance to the conclusion that Microsoft sucks.

First, this 100 million number is ambiguous at best. One might assume that Gates included all sales in that figure, including volume licensing deals. This, however, seems to conflict with numbers that have already been published. For instance, as of October 2007, Microsoft said they sold 88 million copies of Vista, in *addition* to 42 million volume licensing purchases. See: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/26/88-million-copies-of-Vista-shipped_1.html

The 89 million number cited for XP must have included volume licensing sales as well, because Microsoft's press release regarding the sales of XP during the first year of availability explicitly states that XP sold 67 million copies on new PCs *and* via retail upgrades.

In other words, XP was sold on, at absolute most, about 50% of new PCs in 2002. It was actually probably a bit less than this because the 67 million licenses *included* upgrades.

So, if we assume that Gates was talking about the sales of Vista on new PCs (not upgrades), and we factor in the 20% quarterly sales growth that Vista sales have seen since it was released, we get about 105 million units sold. This represents about 41% of all new PCs shipped, world wide. This number doesn't even account for the holiday season's affect on sales.

In order for sales to be identical to XP, we only need for 14% of people who bought XP during the first year to have bought it as a upgrade. I would say that's a pretty reasonable hypothesis. If you don't find that to be reasonable, PCs with Vista only need to sell at about double the rate during the holiday season as they sell during the rest of the year in order for Vista to hit that 50% mark. Either way, if you mix each of these factors, it becomes very easy for the Vista sales numbers to pan out in Vista's favor.

Furthermore, I was unable to find the data that shows where all those new PC purchases were coming from. The fastest growing PC market is Asia, especially China. Studies have shown that the piracy rate in China is over 90%. We have no idea how this information affected Vista sales overall. (Although, honestly, probably not much.)

It's certainly possible that Vista sales aren't as good as XP's, but we don't have that data yet, and it's definitely not the blowout that this article suggests. The data we do have suggests that Vista sales are about the same as XP as a percentage of total PC sales.

Fiber is coming. Actually, in my hometown, it's here -- 100 mbits to the home. Just did the math, and that means at most an hour and a half to download 50 gigs of data -- assuming it's a full Blu-Ray disc (most BR movies are only 25 gigs). Unless you live right next to NetFlix, or you're getting some 10 or 15 discs per day, that pretty much has you beat.

Hmmmm..... A residentail fiber offering, giving 100Mbps in the US? I think not. I don't know where you're getting that 100mbps number; the fastest I've seen mentioned (yet to be built, as far as I can tell) is supposed to be about 25mbps.

Is he really stepping down? The link in the article asks me to install Silverlight and I can't read it as such.... The other links don't say anything like it. (My mistake: this one does) A Google search yields this, though.

Anyway, if I'd been him, I'd have retired years ago ;-)

That page leads to a link, Readme for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 which says:

5.5.1 Scripting Incompatible with Microsoft Windows Vista In this release, Microsoft Visual Studio for Applications (VSA)--the scripting development environment and run-time engine that the Script task and Script component in Integration Services use--is incompatible with the final version of Windows Vista. If a computer is running the final version of Windows Vista, you cannot use that computer to edit or debug scripts in Integration Services, nor run Integration Services packages that contain scripts.

Let's just add that to the incompatibility list, shall we? Development tool and all the applications ever developed with it.

Thanks for the link. So the database runs, that's compatible, if the app that requires it installs and/or permits SP2. Yay. No SSIS scripts though. I've never used SSIS, but I bet somebody thinks that's important.

Let's see what Microsoft has to say about SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), shall we?

This paper discusses the challenges that face businesses that rely on data integration technologies to provide meaningful, reliable information to maintain a competitive advantage in today's business world. It discusses how SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) can help Information Technology departments meet data integration requirements in their companies. Real-world scenarios are included.

Hmmm. Reliable. I don't think that word means what they think it means. I should think if I relied on their reliable SSIS to maintain a competetive advantage and then discovered the very next year that it was incompatible with the OS that was in Beta when it came out, that would be the last time I relied on that particular vendor.

Y'know what? If you have any more corrections to this thread, why don't you go ahead and just post them to the wiki. It's a wiki, y'know. You can fix what's wrong with it if you disagree with it - but it seems to be more reliable than your information. Anyway, Mary Jo Foley seemed to like it. On a completely different note, she's blogging today about Microsoft relenting on the disabling older file formats issue. A reminder to those that don't know: Microsoft chose to disable access to some older file formats because it couldn't be bothered to clean up the code that opened those file types. They didn't do it because they wanted to render archived documents unreadable or to force people to buy newer versions of Office as some here have claimed.

That page leads to a link, Readme for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 which says:

5.5.1 Scripting Incompatible with Microsoft Windows Vista In this release, Microsoft Visual Studio for Applications (VSA)--the scripting development environment and run-time engine that the Script task and Script component in Integration Services use--is incompatible with the final version of Windows Vista. If a computer is running the final version of Windows Vista, you cannot use that computer to edit or debug scripts in Integration Services, nor run Integration Services packages that contain scripts.

Let's just add that to the incompatibility list, shall we? Development tool and all the applications ever developed with it.

Thanks for the link. So the database runs, that's compatible, if the app that requires it installs and/or permits SP2. Yay. No SSIS scripts though. I've never used SSIS, but I bet somebody thinks that's important.

Let's see what Microsoft has to say about SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), shall we?

This paper discusses the challenges that face businesses that rely on data integration technologies to provide meaningful, reliable information to maintain a competitive advantage in today's business world. It discusses how SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) can help Information Technology departments meet data integration requirements in their companies. Real-world scenarios are included.

Hmmm. Reliable. I don't think that word means what they think it means. I should think if I relied on their reliable SSIS to maintain a competetive advantage and then discovered the very next year that it was incompatible with the OS that was in Beta when it came out, that would be the last time I relied on that particular vendor.

Y'know what? If you have any more corrections to this thread, why don't you go ahead and just post them to the wiki. It's a wiki, y'know. You can fix what's wrong with it if you disagree with it - but it seems to be more reliable than your information. Anyway, Mary Jo Foley seemed to like it. On a completely different note, she's blogging today about Microsoft relenting on the disabling older file formats issue. A reminder to those that don't know: Microsoft chose to disable access to some older file formats because it couldn't be bothered to clean up the code that opened those file types. They didn't do it because they wanted to render archived documents unreadable or to force people to buy newer versions of Office as some here have claimed.

For what it's worth, they're still working on it for Windows 7.

Link here to an article about MinWin, which is also mentioned in the Windows 7 Wikipedia article.

> If I want to go to gmail, my bank, whatever,
> I'm definitely not going to follow a link from some random website or e-mail.

The bigger picture is coupled with XSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting) or a writeable web root*, you could be redirected without even knowing it. Malware could also drop a local web page on your computer and redirect you there to offer up the exploit. How about when you purchase things on Ebay and click "Continue to my PayPal account". For every person like yourself who is extra careful, there are 1000 people that are not**. This is why exploits like this are such a big deal.

[*] - http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=15
[**] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet

It could sneak on just as easy with an x86 based AMD.

Anyway, who cares, if someone wants to pay extra and put windows on it, it's their business. It's not my job (or yours, or anyones) to dictate what OS can be used on someones computer.

Looky.. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=691

You know, this whole Vista thing is probably a Microsoft strategy, assuming the premise that "MS coders read /. is true." See, it works like this: MS readers see repeated predictions that 2008 (or 2009 or 2010) will be the "year of the Linux desktop." After seeing all this, they create the following battle plan, as revealed by these "confidential email snippets":

Email 1: "Hey, this open source thing seems to be gaining momentum... momentum is very important in everything from sports to elections, so how do we get the momentum back?" Email 2: "We release a bloated, resource hog of an OS to the masses, and as currently nothing but a few Dell laptops are sold with anything but Windows, adoption of this OS is going to be certain, as people will have no choice. OSS/Linux will continue to gain ground and momentum, but then, in 2010, we will shift momentum so dramatically that they will be buried forever! We simply release a new version of Windows in 2010 that combines all the features originally promised for Vista that were later dropped (we'll claim time constraints were the issue and hope people forget this version of Windows had more development time than any other) with a massive performance boost that we will get by replacing the bloated core of the OS with the new MinWin. AND we will do all of this in an amazing three years... just half the development time of Vista (most people won't remember that other huge MS OS advances, like Windows 95, were done in similar amounts time). People will be so astonished and relieved at the creation of this OS that they will all move from Vista to Windows 7 (the 2010 version) in ONE WEEK, thus destroying all OSS momentum and killing Linux forever. 2010 will be the year of teh Windows, and Microsoft will reign supreme!!!!!!"

The really scary part here is that all of this sounds halfway plausible...

The annoyances with Vista can at least be fixed with unchecking a few boxes.

You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.

My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...

My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...

Ten years ago, Netscape was the leading browser. Look at this

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-512100.html/

We "the non-Microsoft" camp are still trying to recover from IE. Bundling it with OS and then providing it for free was an effective way of killing any competition. That's way Microsoft hates Linux. They cannot give away their OS for free unless they are fighting for their life. Hence they cannot kill of Linux like they did to Netscape. Netscape might be bloat but reason it was bloat was to give users more choices when IE had the equal footing with Netscape and came for free. Would anyone download a free software if you had a similiar free software installed ?

Ed Bott has a little more on the problem:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=348

Still a very serious issue though - for my sins, I'm a Windows Home Server MVP and we have a call with the WHS team on Jan 2nd, at which I'm expecting to find out more. I'll be posting any updates we can share at my blog: http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/

Cheers
Terry

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12354-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=42625&messageID=786603&start=0 Please, flame this moron...he's got no sense and claims to be an "expert" in IT...so everyone at Slashdot please register an account on this crap site and let this idiot "No_Ax" know what you think.

I like your ideas but I have no time to respond.

just this for the cost of windows to manufacturers:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=118

it's the closest I can get to. so following these points, the most I can see people paying for windows in 50$. I've seen several other quotes online that MS charges Dell 25 to 50$ but with the bloatware they throw on, the actual cost to Dell is significantly less. It's not something where we can see the total contracts to value it, but my gut says these numbers are roughly right. Notice I am drawing a line between what I pay and how much money goes into the pockets of MS. I have no doubt these are two very different numbers.

I think the discussion should be framed purely around where copyrights should be. Are current tenors too long and do we penalize too sharply for violations. Is it in any way a method of securing income for an artist for a limited time. Along with this is how binding we want copyrights to be as a society. I don't have a problem with record labels taking part in this discussion and frankly, they seem to be the only ones that care to(engage in the discussion) and I think the actions of our government are showing that. But there is no reason I see why a book should be treated different from a movie or a song.

You are editing a file that is saved directly to a shared folder on WHS, which WHS accepts and gives the A-OK signal to your software, then later has a problem writing the file, and tells you about it, with no chance of recovering the file at that time. Since this can happen after you have exited your software, you have no way of recovering the file.

The problem is not:

• You make backup files, then try to edit them directly on the WHS share folder.
• Your backup files get corrupted.
• You are doing something that WHS was not intended for.

The third one is the trickiest. See, if you go to the current WHS Discover site (click Help and How-To's) you will see that the big thing is Remote Access, Media Sharing, and Computer Backup. This would lead people to believe that any other use, is not what it was meant for, and when something goes wrong, you should have known better.

But, one only needs to look back at previous pages for WHS to see that Sharing was a central feature. Yes, full sharing, not just Media Sharing. Even the Overview of that page focuses on sharing first, and backup (protection) was third. The first overview item was Sharing, and that is simply what this problem is about, shared folders. Either for your own use as a networked server, or to share with other users.

Now, if you go to Eric Bott's blog, you will see the explanation that the largest factor is "a home server is under extreme load." Well, I'm sorry, but if the touted role, even at the beginning and not right now, was acting as a share folder to save your stuff to, then by damn it better do that. If the server gets loaded down, it should not pretend it got the file and tell you later that it didn't, it should just either not respond (and your software would have to let you know it couldn't do it) or it should give an error response (your software's problem now).

Honestly, this product was marketed as a home server for storing and sharing your files, with acting as a backup server making 3rd on the list of features. Now, they want to change that and say that it is for backup first, file sharing from special locations and under special conditions, and not really for file storage.

Look here!! http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=348/

The internal name for the product was NetDocs. It was basically supposed to be a suped up version 7 years ago of what Google apps is today. Ultimately, it was killed and a few of the pieces collected together into what is now InfoPath.

Couldn't or wouldn't? When they were under pressure earlier this decade, Microsoft spent a lot of money lobbying/buying off US state and federal governments, creating fake "grass roots" campaign sites and paying for press releases from pro-corporate lobbyist groups such as the cato institute (source1 source2).

I usually don't read TFAs. But when I noticed that the author has used JPEG encoding for a screenshot, I didn't bother to read what he has to say.

From this screenshot it appears that the pause functionality will be there.
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-176747-24.html

The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another.

If one should reflect on history to see how such a resource would be used, one could come to the conclusion that it would not be used for security or keeping the USA safe. no.

The backdoor would only be used for industrial espionage like Echelon.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-521985.html

I see no proof of this. Apple responds relatively quickly to security holes and releases regular patches and updates.

Well, yes and no. Apple *is* very good with many security issues, but here are a few counter-examples off the top of my head:

• CVE-2007-2788: Integer overflow in the embedded ICC profile image parser in the JDK. Unpatched for over a year.
• CVE-2007-0243: Buffer overflow in the Sun JDK GIF parser. Vulnerability was made public on January 17th, 2007, and was unpatched until December 13th, 2007.
• CVE-2007-5232: When Java applet caching is enabled, allows remote attackers to violate the security model for an applet's outbound connections. Released October 5th, 2007, unpatched until December 13th, 2007.

Apple is not operating at 100% all of the time. In the case of these Java updates, some potentially serious issues sat unpatched for a good long while.

I see no proof of this. Apple responds relatively quickly to security holes and releases regular patches and updates.

Well, yes and no. Apple *is* very good with many security issues, but here are a few counter-examples off the top of my head:

• CVE-2007-2788: Integer overflow in the embedded ICC profile image parser in the JDK. Unpatched for over a year.
• CVE-2007-0243: Buffer overflow in the Sun JDK GIF parser. Vulnerability was made public on January 17th, 2007, and was unpatched until December 13th, 2007.
• CVE-2007-5232: When Java applet caching is enabled, allows remote attackers to violate the security model for an applet's outbound connections. Released October 5th, 2007, unpatched until December 13th, 2007.

Apple is not operating at 100% all of the time. In the case of these Java updates, some potentially serious issues sat unpatched for a good long while.

There are a lot of people who think that web, Ajax and Flash applications are a very bad thing. Not just users, but also noted developers and usability experts.

More thoughts on why Ajax is bad for web applications: this is about how Ajax apps are often very fragile and usually don't work as expected.

Ephemeral Web-Based Applications: usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes this great article that goes into depth about how most web apps are complete failures when it comes to usability. Even something as basic as navigation quickly becomes unintuitive and difficult.

Why the .NET framework makes for bad web applications: this explains why .NET apps using some of the latest technology around is often a bad idea.

You're not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn't matter)!: Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson talks about how we don't need web apps everywhere.

There are a lot of anti-web app articles here. Having done a lot of web apps for years now i think a lot of them are spot on although they are really against web apps when web apps probably are the best tool for the job:
Web apps: taking five years to get to where desktop apps were a decade earlier?

A JavaScript tip built on years of experience: try to avoid JavaScript.

Why is Web page layout still such a problem?

Web 2.0: A serious case of diarRIA.

AJAX: the "ricer" of the software development world?

Keep the Web in the browser, please.

The wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects.

An example of the sorry state of JavaScript today.

The Web is inherently an inadequate application development platform.

Where is the developer productivity increase with JavaScript-based Web applications?

A great Web developer is a waste of a really great application developer.

Troll, FUD, Flamebait, wow guys get some original material or shut up already. I didn't find anything directly on update.microsoft.com but a very quick google search will show you just how "secure" Microsoft keeps their own shit.

http://www.news.com/2100-7349_3-6085589.html
http://www.zone-h.org/content/view/227/31/
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6085589.html
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/11/03/001103hnhacker.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/01/10/ms.taiwan.idg/index.html
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,2086058,00.htm

There are many more but I'm not really in the mood for doing other folks homework for them.

The red one seems to be the real deal as it only glows where it's fur doesn't block the skin. Granted it glows rather weakly but that may be simply because it's fur is not white (or doesn't appear to be) so it doesn't reflect the glow as much as say white mice would.

Yes, so new.

yeah we all know about Ask.com's privacy initatives

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ask-toolbars/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=858
http://www.benedelman.org/news/050205-1.html
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_131461.htm
http://research.sunbelt-software.com/threatdisplay.aspx?threatid=14137
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ask.com

and their seedy domains that target children

cursormania.com
funbuddyicons.com
funwebproducts.com
historyswatter.com
myfuncards.com
mymailnotifier.com
mymailstationery.com
mymailsignature.com
mymailstamp.com
mywebsearch.com
popswatter.com
popularscreensavers.com
smileycentral.com
zwinky.com

ask.com are nothing but lying, deceptive scumbags, they deserve every lawsuit and fine they get

The biggest issue, IMHO, is that making something that can run Windows adds extra constraints and drives up hardware costs. For example, Windows needs x86 and lots of RAM. That automatically prevents making a lot od design decisions such as using ARM CPUs and smaller RAM footprints - which would have made a cheaper, lower power device (less hand cranks per page load).

That's some leet hakking going on there...

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/index.php?p=780
http://www.tjmcintyre.com/2005/06/morris-tribunal-learns-pitfalls-of.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=464

The selling of the iPhone locked to one vendor can hardly be called a monopoly... there are other phones and there are other providers, just because that specific combination is not available everywhere doesn't qualify. That is also the sole reason that the court has ruled in favor of the deal. But there is another case open because T-mob might very well be in violation of their license http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-6219520.html and if Debitel succeeds in this case the iPhone will again be free.

PDF can be implemented right up until Adobe threatens to sue you if you implement it. Although they're perfectly fine with you offering it as a free download instead.

doh, read the patents in question here.

A blog on ZDNet has this interesting bit:

This drastic change in Microsoft's WGA system is only the latest in series of attempts to smooth WGA's rough edges. In August, Kochis apologized on Microsoft's WGA blog for an outage that incorrectly flagged thousands of customers' systems as "non genuine." In October, Microsoft removed the WGA validation requirement from IE7 downloads. Two weeks ago, on November 20, Kochis promised to "build more trust in WGA" by improving its back-end systems, its response times, and its customer support.

Getting rid of the "kill switch" is a much better way to build that trust.

This is software explicitly designed to make your computer less useful. It does nothing else for you. Why would "improving its back-end systems" ever make me trust it the least bit more?

Accept it from vulnerability-scanning company Qualys then.