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Linux Notebooks Selling Well On Amazon Germany on Sunday July 26, @04:40AM
“The LinuxTech.net blog points out that Linux notebooks are currently selling quite well on Amazon’s list in Germany. The blog includes screenshots showing the Linux Asus and Aspire notebooks in positions 2 and 4, respectively, on that list. These machines are not netbooks, but full notebooks, albeit on the moderate to low side regarding price and performance. That LinuxTech.net blog was dated 23 July 2009, and the Asus machine is still holding second place more than one day later, while the Acer machine slipped to fifth position, despite the volatile nature of Amazon bestseller lists. While these two data points are just snapshots in time, they are consistent with other data showing that Microsoft itself attributes some of its recent weak earnings to surging sales of low-end notebooks, as well as data showing that the Linux-powered and Unix-powered computers topped Amazon’s sales charts in all categories for 2007. If there is to ever be a ‘year of desktop (or laptop) Linux’, it won’t happen all at once, but will creep up in ways similar to what we are seeing now.”
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Linux Notebooks Selling Well On Amazon Germany on Sunday July 26, @04:40AM
26 Jul 09 | The Irksome Cellphone Industry on Saturday July 25, @11:19AM
“David Pogue of the NYTimes wonders why Congress is worrying about exclusive handset contracts when there are more significant things that are broken, unfair, and anti-competitive in the American cellphone industry. He lists text messaging fees, double billing, handset subsidies, international call rates, and ‘airtime-eating instructions’ among the major problems not being addressed by Congress. ‘Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising. Why doesn’t it occur to them that they’d attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable? By being less greedy and obnoxious? By doing what every other industry does: try to please customers instead of entrap and bilk them? But no. Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.’”
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The Irksome Cellphone Industry on Saturday July 25, @11:19AM
Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store on Saturday July 25, @10:47PM
“Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft’s retail shops may look like, noting that you’ll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft’s take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar).”
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Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store on Saturday July 25, @10:47PM
The Best First Language For a Young Programmer on Saturday July 25, @10:22AM
“Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and considered by some to be the ‘latin of programming,’ is really the best first language for a young programmer. As he sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but ‘lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.’ And though the ‘hacker ethic’ may in fact be harming today’s developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to ‘develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer’ by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, ‘what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,’ and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck. ‘If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.’”
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The Best First Language For a Young Programmer on Saturday July 25, @10:22AM
Free Web Content a “Myth,” Claims Barry Diller on Saturday July 25, @09:20AM
“Following in the footsteps of other traditional media executives who just don’t get it, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, and that’s that. The media and technology executive said it’s ‘mythology’ to view the Internet as a system of free communications. ‘It is not free, and is not going to be,’ Diller said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. Companies from Disney to New York Times Co. are seeking ways to extract revenue from the Internet. The latter recently said that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s web site.”
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Free Web Content a “Myth,” Claims Barry Diller on Saturday July 25, @09:20AM
The Rocky Road To Wind Power on Thursday July 23, @07:40PM
“The NY Times has an interesting story on the logistical problems involved in transporting disassembled towers that will reach more than 250 feet in height from ports or factories to the remote, windy destinations where the turbines are erected. In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. In Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected. And in Maine a truck carrying a big piece of turbine got stuck for hours while trying to round a corner near Searsport.”
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The Rocky Road To Wind Power on Thursday July 23, @07:40PM
Microsoft Backs Down On Making IE8 Default At Upgrade on Monday July 20, @08:44AM
“Internet Explorer 8 will no longer replace the default browser when a user selects the ‘Use express settings’ option during installation. Back in May, Mozilla and Opera accused Microsoft of force-feeding users Internet Explorer 8 through the Automatic Updates process. The object of their ire was the ‘Use express settings’ option which automatically sets Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. The option was already ticked when Automatic Updates offered users the choice to upgrade their browser. ‘We heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit,’ notes Microsoft in a blog post.”
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Microsoft Backs Down On Making IE8 Default At Upgrade on Monday July 20, @08:44AM
Security Threats 3 Levels Beyond Kernel Rootkits on Saturday July 18, @06:19PM
“Tom’s Hardware has a long interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages). Many think that kernel rootkits are the most dangerous attacks, but Joanna and her team have been studying exploits beyond Ring 0 for some years. Joanna is most well known for the BluePill virtualization attack (Ring -1) and in this interview she chats a little bit about Ring -2 and Ring -3 attacks that go beyond kernel rootkits. What’s surprising is how robust the classic BluePill proof-of-concept is: ‘Many people tried to prove that BluePill is “detectable” by writing various virtualization detectors (but not BluePill detectors). They simply assumed that if we detect a virtualization being used, this means that we are “under” BluePill. This assumption was made because there were no products using hardware virtualization a few years ago. Needless to say, if we followed this way of reasoning, we might similarly say that if an executable makes network connections, then it must surely be a botnet.’”
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Security Threats 3 Levels Beyond Kernel Rootkits on Saturday July 18, @06:19PM
UK Police Raid Party After Seeing “All-Night” Tag On Facebook on Saturday July 18, @02:09AM
“Apparently the police like to spend their time trawling our private information on Facebook looking for criminals. ‘Riot police stormed a man’s 30th birthday barbecue for 15 guests because it was advertised as an “all-night” party on Facebook. Four police cars, a riot van, and a force helicopter were dispatched to a privately-owned field in a small village near Sowton, Devon in the UK on Saturday, ordering the party shut down or everyone would be arrested. The birthday barbecue was busted up before they even had a chance to plug the music in, reports the BBC. It was about 4pm when eight officers with camouflage pants and body armor jumped out of their vehicles and ordered everyone out about an hour into the party.’ The event’s organizer, Andrew Poole, said, ‘The police had full-on camouflage trousers on and body-armour, it was ridiculous. There were also several plain-clothes officers as well … they kept on insisting it has been advertised it as an all-night rave on the internet. The times on it were put as “overnight” in case people wanted to sleep-over, but after being explained this they were still banging on saying it was advertised on the internet. They wouldn’t accept it wasn’t a rave. It was in a completely isolated field.’”
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UK Police Raid Party After Seeing “All-Night” Tag On Facebook on Saturday July 18, @02:09AM
Huge Unidentified Organic Blob Floating Around Alaska on Thursday July 16, @10:39AM
“The Anchorage Daily News reports that a 15 mile-long blob of unknown, ‘gooey,’ probably organic material is floating past communities on Alaska’s North Slope. The US Coast Guard sent pollution experts to investigate, who determined that it was not an oil spill or other type of pollution, but were unable to determine what it is. A sample is currently being analyzed by experts in Anchorage, while the blob is following the current northwards.”
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Huge Unidentified Organic Blob Floating Around Alaska on Thursday July 16, @10:39AM
