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Comment Re:Mung (Score 1) 288

Thanks for the grammar lesson, but in this case your argument is moot. Munging has reference to the word mung while mungeing has reference to the very different word munge.

See the correct usage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munge and, if you wish, take a look at the article's history and note that the usage portion was written a long time before this Slashdot article.
Windows

Vista To XP Upgrade Triples In Price, Now $150 907

ozmanjusri writes "Dell has tripled the charge to upgrade Vista PCs to XP. Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system. Rob Enderle says the downgrade fees could potentially be disastrous for Microsoft: 'The fix for this should be to focus like lasers on demand generation for Vista but instead Microsoft is focusing aggressively on financial penalties," says Enderle. 'Forcing customers to go someplace they don't want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.'"

Comment Security Now, MacBreak Tech, Security Bites, etc. (Score 1) 205

There are several TWiT podcasts, and some of them only partially meet the criteria of the person who submitted the question. Let's review the criteria: "entertaining, informative, and, most importantly, thorough," not dumbed down, "dive deep into projects and discussions instead of simply skimming the surface."

The two TWiT podcasts that meet all the criteria that come immediately to mind are Security Now and the (unfortunately now defunct) MacBreak Tech. Security Now is very technical and educational, and it doesn't dumb things down, but instead it manages to explain very technical topics in ways that make them easy to comprehend. It's mostly about computer and information security (naturally) but it also gets into networking and other related topics as well. MacBreak Tech was mainly focused on Macs as the name implies, but I learned a lot of things from the podcast that don't just apply to Macs specifically. I think all the old episodes are still available, so browse through the titles and descriptions and download anything that looks remotely interesting.

Other TWiT podcasts that the asker might enjoy: This Week in Law and FLOSS Weekly. This Week in Law gets in depth about the legal aspects of computer technology and the computer industry. FLOSS Weekly is all about Free (Libre) Open Source Software and consists largely of interviews with lead developers of major open source software projects.

Another decent computer security podcast is Security Bites from CNET. Security Bites is not nearly as in-depth as Security Now as the episodes are very short and more focused, but the show is worth listening to as well.

If you don't mind the shameless self-promotion, I'm one of the hosts of MacMod Live, which deals with Mac modding and peripherally-related topics. MacMod Live doesn't always get super technical, but MacMod.com has a lot of interesting stuff too if you're interested in computer modding.

All of the above are audio shows (sorry if you're looking for video content specifically). Occasionally we do videos on MacMod Live, and those get posted in the same podcast feed as our audio shows.

Transportation

Americans Refusing To Wait For Mainstream EVs 779

hazehead writes "The growing trend of folks refusing to wait for big-car manufacturers to deliver mainstream electric vehicles is starting to get some press. From DIY tinkerers in Atlanta trying to keep money from going overseas (or simply from leaving their wallets) to a guy in Oregon building an open source Civic conversion kit, Americans are taking energy policy in their own grease-stained hands."
Space

Ghostly Ring Found Circling Dead Star 207

Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of scientists has found a strange ring around a dead star by using images taken by NASA's Spitzer space telescope. This star, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. According to NASA, a magnetar is 'a highly magnetized neutron star and the remnant of a brilliant supernova explosion signaling the death throes of a massive star.' So far, about a dozen magnetars have been found. An amazing thing about these stellar objects is their magnetic field. One of the researchers said that 'magnetars possess magnetic fields a million billion times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth.'
Media

MediaDefender's BitTorrent-Based DOS Takes Down Revision3 426

Sandman1971 writes "Over the long Memorial Day weekend, Revision3 was the target of a malicious Denial Of Service Attack which brought R3 to its knees. After investigating the matter, it was discovered that the source of the attacks came from MediaDefender, the famed company hired by the MPAA and RIAA to try and stop the spread of illegal file sharing. The kicker? Revision3 was taken down for running a bittorent tracker to distribute its own legal content."
Data Storage

Western Digital Touts New 'Green' Drives 119

An anonymous reader writes "Western Digital today announced the availability of a new line of serial ATA drives that are supposed to use 4 to 5 watts less than other competitive drives from Hitachi GST, Fujitsu and Seagate. The new "GreenPower" line comes in 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. Western Digital says it achieves better power performance by balancing the platter's spin speed in order to make it more efficient, by optimizing seek speeds and by parking the read heads when the disk is idle, according to a Computerworld story."
Google

Google's Android Cellphone SDK Released 283

AchiIIe writes "The android SDK has been released to the wild. As expected it features the Linux Kernel, low level libraries such as FreeType, OpenGL, SQL Lite, WebKit (as a web browser), a custom Java Bytecode interpreter that is highly specialized for the CPU. A common java API is provided. A video has been posted with an the overview of the API." SM: Several readers have also written to mention the Android Developer Challenge offering $10 million in prizes for cool mobile apps.
Microsoft

Ballmer Calls Android a "Press Release" 270

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot down Google's new mobile platform at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and said the mobile platform market is 'Microsoft's world.' Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. 'Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],' Ballmer said. 'Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world,' he added."
The Internet

Gmail Vulnerability May Expose User Information 94

An anonymous reader writes "A cross-site scripting vulnerability may mean bad news for Gmail users. The ethical hacking group GNUCitizen has developed a proof-of-concept program that deftly steals contact information and emails from the popular web-based mail service. At the moment there are no 'wild' exploits for this vulnerability. The article discusses how lax security makes holes like this a problem for corporate IT houses as well as Google. '"People do use private accounts to store work information," IBRS security analyst James Turner said. "I've worked at one organization where this was implicitly expected, because the mail server at the time was so unreliable. But that scenario is certainly less than optimal. "In an ideal world, an organization would be able to draw a line in the sand and say that corporate data does not pass this point. The current reality is that there are Gen-Y workers who are sharing information with each other on multiple alternative communication channels--Gmail and Facebook included."'" This, just a few days after a search-based exploit was discovered.
Security

Submission + - Security to sit on the chip (theinquirer.net)

Tech.Luver writes: "theinquirer reports, " SECURITY OUTFIT Symantec, and the maker of chips, Intel, are apparently sitting in smoke filled rooms trying to hammer security products into processors. Symantec Vice President Rowan Trollope told Reuters yesterday that the project, dubbed Project Hood, is part of an effort by both companies to expand their use of virtualisation technology. ""
The Internet

Submission + - Don't Kill The Trolls, But Feed Them (seorefugee.com) 2

Henk van Ess writes: "Voelspriet.nl has initiated an idea to rid communities (be it forums, blogs, whatever) of trolls. Not get rid of them by banning them or nuking their posts, no, by accepting their trolly messages and keeping them at ease. The smart thing is that this anti-troll plug-in only shows the trolly stuff to the troll itself. That way, the other community members need not suffer. The idea was presented today on Dutch radio in Radio Online. A free beta plug-in for Wordpress will be available soon."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - FOX commits changes to wikipedia

HNS-I writes: geeksaresexy[dot]net Has a story about wikiality in action. After O'Reilly announced that the FOX employees have been making chenges to articles on wikipedia a guy sought out the IP address belonging with the edits and started inspecting other articles on edits by the same address. The most obvious to start with were of course the ones about conservatism, democrats and Keith Olbermann.

RTFA to see the changes that were made
HNS
PS. I advice you to edit this yourselves

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