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The ZDNet article is a fair amount better than the register for this topic as well.

In DSL, different straining materials are applied to the top of the transistor layer and then etched away from where they aren't needed or from where they can even degrade performance. Materials that create tensile strain to benefit N-channel transistors are applied across the surface of the wafer; chemical etching then removes those materials away from the P-channel transistors.

Subsequently, a layer of material for compressing the silicon lattice, which benefits the P-channel transistors, is applied and etched. The materials for straining N-channel or P-channel transistors can be applied in either order.

"On the P-channel transistors, you want to increase the density of atoms because the holes can move more quickly," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64.

Kepler did not disclose the materials used but said they were fairly conventional nitride films and inexpensive. Plus, applying the straining materials after the transistor layer is complete is easier.

In the US we have had Carnivore for years ... meh
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-524798.html?leg acy=zdnn/

Actually, George W Bush uses a Dell .

Article about Firefox

I submitted this same story with a lot more detail (but not the InformationWeek link) 28 hours prior to the timestamp on this story. It was rejected. Sure, mod me off-topic if you think I'm whining.

I posted my write-up in my journal for posterity's sake. Replies are welcome on this post in regards to the actual news story. Comments as to why you think the submission was rejected should only be posted in the journal. (You don't want to be off-topic, right?) Did I submit at the wrong time of day? Was the submission too long? Ok... enough whining.

I won't make you do unnecessary clicking, so here are some of the relevant links that I found:
Penn State's own news article
Chronicle of Higher Education article
ZDnet article

The journal entry also has comments taken from a PSU IT personnel listserv, as well as other links.

"The cost of a tablet PC is $200 (7,000 Taiwan dollars) more than its notebook counterpart. Of this difference, the hardware cost is only between $30 and $60. The majority of the difference comes from the OS license," said Wang. "We have tried to negotiate the fee with Microsoft several times in vain. It's very regrettable."

(Source: Acer: Tablet PC fees hard to swallow)

In the 1980s, IBM opened representative offices in Beijing and Shanghai, followed in 1992 by establishment of the IBM China Company Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM World Trade Corporation. The IBM China Research Laboratory was established in Beijing in 1995. Today, IBM China has offices in 11 cities and operates eight joint venture companies in China.
--PrimeUR

IBM built and operates a chip packaging plant in China (registration site), a Research Laboratory in China, and is eyeing upward of a 50 percent share of China's market for business computers. Even IBM mainframes are big in China

IBM is creating a chip ecosystem in China and expects that Asian manufacturers will represent the bulk of the new Power licensees

Sure, you would have been correct in May 2002, when Microsoft exec Jim Allchin testified that releasing their source code would endanger national security. I mean, surely there's no way a Microsoft executive would perjure himself to try and keep his company from being penalized for its crimes!

However, Microsoft fixed all these security problems by January 2003, when they had their source code cleaned up enough to show to 60 countries including China. So you shouldn't spread any more of these scurrilous rumors; why, that would imply that Microsoft would commit treason just to try and increase foreign revenues!

munich is back on the linux track:
see zdnet artcle here
or the slashdot article here

CNET News.com and ZDNet.

"The Air Force is consolidating its 38 software contracts and nine support contracts with Microsoft into two all-encompassing, agencywide agreements, according to a statement seen by CNET News.com.

The contract, done in conjunction with Dell, will call for the installation and configuration of software as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrades. The deal, which includes 525,000 licenses of Microsoft's Windows and Office, is valued at $500 million over six years, according to Microsoft."

Posted this on my AQFL Web site and even submitted to /. (rejected) on 11/19/2004.

Another quality offering from our favorite game publisher.

Buy your copy today, while supplies last.

We're still waiting for these to come to pass:

September 3, 2002
November 23, 1998
December 5, 2002

How long have people been saying the end of Microsoft is upon us?

Nvidia provided the graphics chipset for the original Xbox. Then they had some sort of falling out with Microsoft over how much they were supposed to be paid. This probably contributed to the Xbox 2 graphics chipset being done by ATI. So Nvidia will be missing the Xbox 2 party, but given that the Xbox deal probably wasn't good for them anyway, it may not be a big loss.

Schwartz said Sun hasn't ruled out releasing Solaris under the General Public License (GPL), the license that governs Linux. That would mean that elements of Solaris could theoretically be adopted in Linux, or vice-versa, though integration of core features could prove technologically difficult.

People are looking at this the wrong way.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5419179.html
Steve Ballmer doesnt want an xbox in the homes of every Mac, Linux and PC user... he wants WINDOWS in every home, everywhere in the world!

The essence of this is, buy Windows and get a free computer. Only, windows in this instance is in the guise of a games machine. Add this desire to get windows out there, with their drive behind XNA, and it's plain to see that MS see gaming as a luctritive way to get millions of users onto Windows.... and more importantly, at a young age!! Sub-20 year olds is an untapped market for the OS creator... hook em early!

It's a similar strategy used by breweries in australia. Lion Nathan bought 90% of pubs and hotels around universities, and stocked only their beer... the idea being to introduce new drinkers to their product as early as possible. They even were giving FREE beer if you were having a party. It costs in the short term, but they aim to have you a customer for life.

No matter where they're based, what have we heard from Ximian since they were purchased? Aside from the occasional talk about connector Ximian is all but dead in the press. The only press one sees anymore is related to Evolution, and even that's not so hot. Once upon a time there were almost weekly Ximian headlines, now where is it? They bought Suse two releases ago and they still don't even ship it with a proper gnome desktop, much less a full featured gnome/ximian/mono desktop.

Thank god it's GPL so Novell can't kill the project entirely.

They've started: The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Sanford Wallace, and U.S. District Court Judge Joseph DiClerico Jr. granted a temporary restraining order - ruling that Wallace and his businesses must refrain from exploiting Internet security vulnerabilities.

Your only hope is to have it shot down in the Supreme Court now. Both parties have been pushing for this for some time. The People had already spoken. We consistently and emphatically told them 'hell no'. Three strikes, you're out, right? Oh no! Now the world's a different place with all the terrorists running about! Privacy is great an all, but the founding fathers could hardly anticipate terrorism! Get with the program you whining liberal pinkos! Now the FBI can sign their own warrant, sneak into your home, plant bugs and video cameras, and basically make Amendment 4 null and void.

May I make one suggestion; Would you be so kind as to change your name from FBI to KGB and give up any pretense? Thanks.

Well, if case you haven't been following the news, the Reps and Dems are proposing checkpoints INSIDE the country.

From the article :

"McCain envisions erecting physical checkpoints, dubbed "screening points," near subways, airports, bus stations, train stations, federal buildings, telephone companies, Internet hubs and any other "critical infrastructure" facility deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Secretary Tom Ridge would appear to be authorized to issue new federal IDs--with biometric identifiers--that Americans could be required to show at checkpoints. "

So I'd say stop the terrorists AT the border instead of making me show papers inside the country.

Of course someone could just steal or trash the paper receipts making an audit almost impossible.
All trash should be guarded as securely as the ballots and the machines. Unfortunately, this could lead to further lawsuits as losers insist on the right to have the rubbish scrutinized as closely as the ballots.

The "vote buying or bullying" issue you brought up is a good one. I guess a valid reason not to leave with a receipt. I recently heard of vote buying and using a cell phone camera for the proof.
People are creative. We should always guard against the old tricks while being alert to these updated versions. Possibly camera phones could be confiscated or the polling place could be rendered a dead zone by those devices used to shut up cell phones in French restarants.

Ultimately "if there's a will there's a way" to hack an election. IMO evoting just adds another layer to the process that can alter an election's outcome.
That's why it is especially important not to complicate the system unnecessarily. The Diebold machines that are in use all over my state are less capable than the butterfly machines that they replace. They don't even do a good job of flagging possible user errors, the sort that results in no vote cast. We had almost as many invalid votes in the last election as back when the butterfly ballots were used.

Thanks again for reply. Deserves a +5, Informative.

Gee, thanks ;-)

seriously though, does anyone know of a "computer" above this number, active allready, and one above 360TFLop/greater performance other than the following(which isn't complete yet?): http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-966312.html ? actually though the whole point of this post is just to point out that the grandparent is incorrect, whereas the parent is not.

In case anyone is skeptical about the parent post. In fact now that I think about it, seriously, guys; the linux number isn't very high. you linux users out there should contribute. join project wool clock

Local loop and long distance, voice over IP (currently in a price war with Vonage), and some silly thing called the Internet.

The amazing thing about it is that it's built at a fraction of the cost/space/size as the Earth simulatior. If I remember correctly, I think they already have some of the systems in place for 36 teraflops. It's the same Blue Gene/L technology from IBM, just a larger scale.

I'm sick of being unemployed, but I'm glad I don't have to work for a company whose high-profile CEO publicly makes these kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nowhere in the article does Ballmer clearly identify how software prices have any relationship to hardware prices.

But lower prices have become part of Microsoft's strategy for gaining market share in developing nations. In recent months, the software maker has announced plans to introduce low-cost "starter editions" of Windows XP into countries including India, Russia and Thailand. These versions will be bundled only with entry-level PCs and will not be available for retail sale.

That's the closest he seems to come to linking the issues of software costs -- in this case, the cost of the OS -- to hardware costs. In the linked article, the software is described as being available only in Hindi. Even more significantly, says that linked article, ... The ability to do home networking and to create multiple user accounts on a single PC has been removed, while display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels. More important, users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.

So, is the cost of an OS really the problem? Well, you can get by with OpenOffice software instead of Windows, find open-source chat and email programs, and compute away.

By the way...concerning everybody's favorite free (as in beer) software, the article says

The Microsoft CEO bristled at the suggestion that Linux is gaining in popularity as a client operating system at the expense of Windows. "There's no appreciable amount of Linux on client systems anywhere in the world," he said.

Verification of this assertion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Back when home PCs were an expensive novelty, my dad, who then worked at Texas Instruments, thought that the TI 99/4A ought to be given away for free with every purchase of an arbitrary suite of software -- this was before we all started using them for spreadsheets and word processing, and long before the Internet became commonplace. I wonder if Ballmer would dare to try to give away hardware pre-loaded with Micrsoft OSes and apps, charging people only for the software. If he did, I predict that given rampant piracy and the Open Software initiative, his attempt would flop.

Read this article. Google also endorsed SPF, I do not know what happened.

But you're missing my point.

Even I've come up with a solution to combat spam.

That is not the point - the point is actual implementation. Google is at liberty to implement what serves their needs best.

But why does Microsoft not go ahead and implement it in their systems? The system was introduced in June-July, and the last time I checked, guess which of Microsoft's mail services have SPF implemented? Microsft? Hotmail? MSN? Xbox? Nope.

NONE of the above.

That is the difference - not suggesting new technologies, but going ahead and implementing them so that people adopt. I mean, they are so good at doing that for other things, why not for something useful?

That's what I feel bad about.

in my NSHO, the Java API has become bloated...

At this point (even before Whidbey) the deciding factor (as always) for Enterprise work, when choosing a language platform, should be the support it has behind it, in terms of IDE, tools, api, and longevity of the vendor pushing it (forget the OpenSource crap argument, those guys are too in love with Perl, Python, and Ruby - Java could become the child nobody wants to talk about if Sun dies) - right now that's C# and the .NET Framework

I like both Java and C# from a language perspective, however, working for a large company, I would recommend Java over MS's .Net. Java has been _very_ stable and _SECURE_ while the .Net security holes have already started at only version 1.1. We also appreciated the fact that we were able to switch our Java server apps to Linux over Solaris, we could even use MS Windows if we wanted to for our Java app servers; we don't have that same choice or luxury with MS .Net.

Here is a short list. Some are in America, others are global. Remember the blank audio tape tax passed in the 80's? It's still in effect as well as a more modern blank CD and CD/DVD burner tax.

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/facts/
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-891781.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/riaa_sues_ moreschools/
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/gee20030 120018251.htm

And here is some info on blank CD taxes in the US and around the world.

Please note that not all of these "taxes" are government taxes in the traditional sense. There are a couple of important questions you should ask yourself though. If every blank CD and new CD/DVD recorder has a tax that is paid to the RIAA (not the artists) as compensation for copyrigt violations, does that mean that we are now free to pirate music since the fine has been paid in advance? Do you believe in corporate welfare? Also, should the public allow tax money to be used to fund governmental investigations into civil matters, such as copyright violations, if said findings are only used to support the corporation (favoring a corporate entity over individual citizen)? Please keep in mind, unless it is bootleging on a massive scale and/or the fradulent copies are sold for profit, it is a civil matter.

Don't forget, we have allowed our rights to me limited more and more over the last couple decades. The media taxes, DMCA, copyright extensions, and many others have made the corporate job of enforcement easier at the expense of personal liberties. The DMCA in paticular only added a few new corporate rights, but was intended to make enforcement/prevention easier at the expense of, lets say, fair use or personal privacy. Not only have we given these corporations laws to make their lives easier, they have the nerve to turn around and say they need tax money because they don't have enough of their own to spend in their defense. It's the equavilent of erasing the fifth ammendment, handing over incriminating evidence, and funding the prosecution.

I read the ZDNet one the other day, and this one is substantially similar.

So, how does eliminating WebDAV, rather than just restricting it to read/delete stop spam?

The article I read said that some new features, which some people consider at least peripherally security, are not going to be in there. Two that were mentioned were the pop-up blocker (not really security IMO) and the new ActiveX handling (definitely security IMO).

Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.

The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.

That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.

Original post follows:

2004-09-22 16:20:39 Sony to Support MP3 (Index,Music) (rejected)

CNet/ZDNet reports that Sony has confirmed 'it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players,' reversing its previous strategy of native support for its proprietary ATRAC music file format only. Currently, MP3 files must be converted into ATRAC format to listen to them on Sony music players. MP3 support will be included on upcoming flash memory-based players, with a decision on hard drive based music players to come later, but there's no word if the Sony Connect music store will offer anything but ATRAC-encoded music. The strategy reversal is seen as a way to compete with Apple's dominant iPod, which supports both MP3 and its own proprietary Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. The story was originally reported by ZDNet France (French) reporters Christophe Guillemin and Pierre Labousset. The move comes on the heels of an IDC study that projects a $58 billion MP3 player market by 2008, with the greatest growth coming from flash memory players (press release).

i really dont want to dampen your enthusiasm, but wasnt the windows source code available to gouvernments and selected companies?

it was even given to the chinese government and didnt leak until very recently... so somehow it seems microsoft hast quite some control over the source they give out.

Prove to me that Sony has sold all their consoles at a loss.

I guarantee you cannot cite adequate evidence to support this. You don't know what you're talking about and you're just repeating the same old crap that gets posted in the games section all the time. Not all consoles are sold at a loss - get over it.

Most of the reliable sources (newspapers, magazines) don't have the stories available for the PlayStation and PS2 in easily-searchable sources like Google news, but a quick search turned up two interesting bits about their current plans:

As per 1Up's article, Sony plans to sell the PSP at a loss. And if you Ctrl+F for the word "loss" in ZDNet's PSX story, it will not only tell you that the PSX was planned to sell at a loss, but that it is generally an industry standard, much like the razorblade entry.

makers typically sell hardware at a loss and make their profits from royalties on game software sales. That model gets shaky, however, when you start cramming nongame functions into the same box, Cole said.

"They've been able to get the price way down on game systems, because they can make it up on software," Cole said. "With these kinds of hybrid devices, you're selling to people who aren't necessarily going to buy a lot of games. But you can't necessarily expect to charge a premium over the existing products it's intended to replace."

The only thing I can't really prove is that Nintendo actually sells theirs at a profit. That's mostly from print sources like EGM's Quartermann column.

"We are still seeing copyright violations being committed and the damage is still occurring on a daily basis, yet the other side said, "What is the problem? Look, we took it out of the future versions."

We showed over a million lines of code and where it has existed. [Linux creator] Linus Torvalds has told me that the Linux kernel has around 5 million lines of code. This derivative code accounts for 20 percent of the Linux code base."
Q&A: SCO Group CEO Darl McBride By Michael Singer
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3 114341

WTF! This guy can find a single line!! he must be blind! The CEO of SCO says that 1/5 of linux is a copy. Darl Mcbride would not lie!!!

Remeber SCO owns c++ too!
"And C++ programming languages, we own those" -Darl McBride
Caldera CEO waves UnitedLinux banner By ZDNet Staff August 15, 2002 http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/0,14179,2877578,00.html

one IM client supporting all widely used standards

just came in his own pants.

Asked why it has taken Microsoft 25 years to get trustworthy computing into the forefront of its efforts, he said: "Because customers wouldn't pay for it until recently."

Assholes.

Really? Their customers (you know, the people that actually pay for the stuff?) seem to like their licensing terms just fine.

The newest MyDoom variant has the author asking for a job...
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1158043
The arnus worm speaks to infected users.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I just know I'm getting calls in the next few days because someone's computer says "How are you...".

All of us are highly sensitized to this issue and have emphasized that these concerns must be addressed," said Geoffrey Strongin, platform security architect for AMD. Strongin argued that, far from undermining privacy, hardware-based security will improve user protections. "What we are doing here is a tremendous enhancement to privacy. Without adequate security, privacy protections is impossible. ( ZDNet)

A compnay called 321 Inc. has a product called LeanOnMe which does this. Based on JXTA. http://news.zdnet.com/2110-3513_22-5319920.html

ZD-Net

Maybe, maybe not. Here's a link.

Outlook Express: "do you want to open this file ?"
Joe Blow: "Yes"
** pc crashes ...

Reminds of Donut , the .NET virus ... but there hasn't been a real one in the wild yet ?.

bash$ alias kill='chmod -R 0666 /'

This reminds me of the system in Key Largo, FL that serves 220 concurrent users from a pair of Compaqs running Red Hat. Notice also that the date on this article is April, 2002.

The $50 fee is to re-enable their access after they have been cut off- AFTER they prove that they are clean, eitherc EXCEPT port 80 and 443 LEAVING their IP being clean, as well as passing through ISP initiated port scans looking for open ports unscathed. You could even force people to register the email addresses of people they wish to email with the ISP, and put a limit on it as well, assuming these people also wanted outgoing port 25 enabled. Since so many (often novice) users rely solely on webmail, this won't be much of a problem.

The $100 fee would INCLUDE a cheap (hardware) firewall which would prevent any incoming port forwards, and potentially limit the outbound connections as well. This would help stop the problem of PC's being infected and becoming open relays.

After somebody (or their machine) has been proven or suspected of being a spammer, an email should be sent to the customer telling them that all outgoing port 25 traffic from their IP will be blocked EXCEPT to the ISP, and even then only allow email to flow to "approved" admin type addresses, not the regular customer base. Implement a system where a user can interact with an AUTOMATED system to quickly re-enable their system, even if it is only to small number of recipients, just so any critical emails they need to send can get through. After a day or two, have even those limited addresses blocked if the system detects large or abnormal amounts of mail being sent out.

If people cannot bother to read their email regularly (and get the admin messages), they should not complain (too loudly) if they miss a "critical" email which details why they can no longer email others.

The key here is EDUCATION, and of course the hardest thing to do is to get somebody to pay attention to something they know nothing about. Even the most fearful user would probably try to figure out why they keep getting hit by these $50 bills and keep having problems sending emails.
If somebody needs to constantly send 1000+ emails to a large variety of people (i.e. running their own mailing list) maybe they should apply for/pay for additional access anyway, so Joe-Bob and his mother can continue to have their basic no-frills service cheap.

Maybe with a little more education the average person will come to realize why us geeks are always pissed about the poor security of Windows boxes, and maybe, just maybe some of that will roll uphill to Redmond and change just a little of the way they implement things.

I can think of a million (probably impractacle) hacks that could be put into place to help ensure your customer base is safe. An ISP could even go the route of using something like the Cisco Security Agent. There are a million links to it, but here's one from ZdNet for those of you all paranoid about marketing information: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/Cisco_Security_Agent.html?tag=tu.arch.link
Basically you could "require" your customers have something like CSA installed to protect their machines are they are simply not allowed on the network. Of course, common sense has to be used (something often lacking, unfortunately) when implementing such policies. If your chosen tool is not available for a specific platform, allow exceptions. We all know that (currently) the biggest threat on the internet is Windows machines anyway, so this isn't unreasonable. Even if something without as much capability as CSA was used, say something with ONLY the ability to to just verify that the virus updates happened in the last X time period, and that critical update X has been installed, etc before they were allowed to access ANYWHERE except those locations, great, the vast majority of problems are solved. ....just don't make a poor Linux or Mac user suffer with draconian, impossible to comply to restrictions...

Microsoft likes to say "Linux is free like a puppy". I say, yes and Microsoft is like the purebred (add the 'b' word here if you wish) that costs a lot upfront and has congenital defects from generations of inbreeding. Sure, she is pretty, but shie is high strung you will spend way too mutch time and money fighting infections. Give me a mutt anyday; the mutt is not only cheap to aquirer, but more robust and better tempered. Saving money up front is only the start of your savings, the real savings is found in the maintenance costs.

META Trend: With distributed n-tier (DBMS, application, Web) server architectures standardizing on Intel, proprietary Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX) will recede to high-end, low-unit-volume, legacy-platform status by 2005/06, displaced by OSs designed for Intel economics: Windows and Linux. Linux will rapidly mature and gain momentum as an ISV reference platform, moving beyond high-volume Web, technical computing, and appliance server environments into mainstream application and DBMS server roles by 2004/05. Linux server growth will initially be at the expense of Unix (2003/04), but will eventually vie for dominance with Windows (2005/06).

We all know that Windows is not any easier than Linux to use or install.

Linux is both easy enough and secure, but the big obstacle is OEMs still holding out. Most users do not want to install or configure their operating system, they want to just plug in their new computer and have it work, be it OS X or Linux.

I'm running Ximian Desktop at home, and I've got a remote X display in a comfortable, sunny room (servers are in the basement). I can definitely attest that full support of LTSP would be a wonderful thing.

There's lots of talk about Linux desktops replacing Windows desktops, but too many people want to use Linux as a drop-in Windows replacement. That's unfortunate, because to really get the most out of Linux, you have to treat it like Linux -- play up its strengths. The remotability of X11 on a window by window basis (as opposed to the whole desktop, which is how it's done in Windows) is central to this.

This is, in fact, how the folks in Largo, FL made their system work so well. Everything runs from big servers. The nice thing about this model is that you can roll out dedicated servers for various applications. You could have a big box dedicated to OpenOffice, for example. It would run lots of instances of that application (and you get the associated memory footprint savings) being displayed on everyone's desktops. Easy to deploy, too: you just publish the icon or menu item to fire it up, and it executes remotely and transparently. The user doesn't even know that the app is running on a different server -- not even when he/she goes to load and save files, because you're using NIS and NFS to unify the authentication and the document directories across all servers.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Elegant and seamless. And it's only possible in a Unix/Linux environment -- Microsoft doesn't have anything even close to this. They can't, because it screws up their pricing model. And we all know that money is more important than technology in their world.

Use cygwin to run kismet under windows: