Erris - Slashdot User

Submission + - Microsoft cuts fees to Latvian government by 60%

Submitted by Janis Berzinsh on Thursday March 26, 2009 @08:18AM

Janis Berzinsh writes: On Monday, Microsoft Latvia announced [ translation ] that it would reduce its fees to the Latvian government by 60% amid Latvia's worsening financial crisis. Coincidentally, this news came shortly after Friday's open letter [ translation ] from the Latvian Open Technologies Association (LATA) to the Latvian Government outlining how the government could immediately save nearly five million Lats by switching some software applications to open source competitors and millions more in the long term. Preempted debate aside, this precedent raises one simple question: Does your government qualify for Microsoft relief?

Submission + - IE8 Not Ready for SaaS, Hosted Services (twentyonetwelve.biz)

Submitted by

dasButcher

on Wednesday March 25, 2009 @12:12PM

dasButcher writes: "Among Internet Explorer 8's many shortcomings is that it's not ready for hosted services, managed services or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. As eWeek discovered (http://tinyurl.com/cvs6re), hosted and SaaS providers are encountering a number of configuration and presentation issues in Microsoft's new browser. The simplest recommendation: Don't upgrade. http://tinyurl.com/cvs6re"

Submission + - Disappointed IE8 Users Revert to IE7

Submitted by nandemoari on Wednesday March 25, 2009 @10:47AM

nandemoari writes: It was reported that as much as 2.61% of all web surfers were using IE8 just three days after the release date. While some assume that these numbers would have doubled or tripled by now, the figures have barely improved. This shows that a number of people decided to give the new browser a try, disliked it for some reason, and abandoned it altogether in a matter of hours. Microsoft has since been flooded with complaints regarding difficulties experienced when printing from web sites, search malfunctions, image problems, load times and the fact that the new browser takes up 4 gigabytes of disk space. While some people went back to using IE7, others decided to experiment with other web browsers on the market. This was the very thing Microsoft was hoping to discourage in the first place.

Feed Wired: NASA Planetary Images Get Microsoft Makeover (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Tuesday March 24, 2009 @06:52PM

NASA has teamed up with Microsoft to make its catalog of high-res planetary images more accessible to the public.

Submission + - The Big Takeover (rollingstone.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 23, 2009 @05:26PM

An anonymous reader writes: Rolling Stone posted a fairly in-depth article on the recent US government bailouts. It provides a history of what lead up to the economic collapse and how it is being used to prop up selected groups using highly secretive lending procedures from the Feds. RTFA, its lengthy but well worth it. Here is an excerpt: "Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market."

Comment Re:It already exists (Score -1) 2

by Erris on Thursday March 19, 2009 @12:19AM (#27251623) Attached to: Indian PM Candidate Promises $200 Laptop

and OLPC and plenty of others. Now all they have to do is buy them and use them as text book and paper substitutes. It's very cool to see a politician who gets that non free is expensive and bad for kids.

Submission + - Pwn2Own 2009: IE8, Firefox, Safari Exploited 1

Submitted by growing PAINS on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @08:59PM

growing PAINS writes: ZDNet's Zero Day blog is reporting that Charlie Miller exploited a zero-day flaw in Apple's Safari browser to take control of a MacBook at this year's CanSecWest Pwn2Own contest. Miller performed the attack in a matter of seconds in a repeat of last year's contest win. Later in the day, a hacker named "Nils" exploited Microsoft's IE 8 running on Windows 7 to claim a new Sony Vaio machine. Nils also exploited Firefox and Safari for the trifecta.

Diebold Admits Flaw In Voting Software 281

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @06:44PM from the is-anyone-shocked dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "At a public hearing in California, Diebold's western region manager has admitted that the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fails to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards."

UK Gov't May Track All Facebook Traffic 204

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @03:20PM from the posted-before-curfew dept.

Jack Spine writes "The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo. This supposedly anti-terrorist measure may be proposed as part of the Intercept Modernisation Programme according to minister Vernon Coaker, and is exactly the sort of deep packet inspection web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned about last week. The measure would get around the inconvenience for the government of not being able to snoop on all UK web traffic."

Submission + - Big Blue SUN?

Submitted by NotQuiteReal on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @02:42PM

NotQuiteReal writes: Does the Slashdot crowd have any opinions on Why IBM wants SUN? I am sure they do. Would this combo be even more competition for Microsoft?

Submission + - Cloudless Sky, M$'s Azure Down All Day. (boycottnovell.com) 1

Submitted by

twitter

on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @11:41AM

twitter writes: "Boycott Novell investigates an outage that few other sites bother to mention.
An hour or so offline may be tolerable at times, but how does it feel for Microsoft to be offline for just under 24 hours? ... There are a few points worth making here: Microsoft can use beta as an excuse; Microsoft gives a bad reputation to such clouds, which may work to its advantage by reducing confidence in SaaS; Almost nobody uses Azure, so reporters neither notice nor care.

Shorter outages at Google have been harped on all the way back to their "Beta" beginning, so it's curious no one reported this outage."

Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional 2nd Ed 232

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @11:40AM from the read-all-about-it dept.

r3lody writes "An extremely large amount of the information we get on a daily basis comes from what we see. Imagery is therefore very important to those who want to communicate with us. When computers had advanced enough to be able to process images in a digital fashion, the market opened up for programs that could manipulate them in many ways. While many professionals would opt for the paid programs, there is a free alternative: GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). The only stumbling block is learning how to use it properly. That is where Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Akkana Peck comes in." Read below for the rest of Ray's review.

Submission + - Indian PM Candidate Promises $200 Laptop (networkcomputing.in) 2

Submitted by

gubm

on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @06:17AM

gubm writes: "The leader of India's main opposition party said that if he's elected prime minister he'll spend the equivalent of $2 billion to procure laptops costing less than $200 each for 10 million Indian students.
The catch: To meet the affordability test, the laptops must be free of pricey applications and operating systems, such as Windows Vista or Windows 7, from commercial software vendors like Microsoft."

Submission + - Linux Foundation video contest voting begins (linuxfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @01:34AM

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone has seen Apple's clever "I'm a Mac" ads, and Microsoft's attempted responses, first with Jerry Seinfeld, and next with "I'm a PC". The Linux Foundation tries to fire back with its community-generated "We're Linux" video contest: all of the eligible videos have now been submitted and are ready to be voted on. Thankfully, the quality of Linux is much higher than the quality of some of these entries: entries range from the hilarious but inappropriate, to the well-made but creepy, to the "I'm sure it sounded good in your head". Thankfully, there are one or two that could actually be real commercials.

Submission + - Microsoft Office 2007 in Linux with WINE (programmerfish.com)

Submitted by

Kenneth Reitz

on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @05:57PM

Kenneth Reitz writes: "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."

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