Tripledub - Slashdot User

Submission + - Has M$ sabotaged Windown XP?

Submitted by Michael Andersen on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @10:32AM

Michael Andersen writes: Is it just me? Or has Microsoft sabotaged XP lately, possibly to 'help' Vista sales along. I work in IT, and I get one machine after the other in to be fixed, and they all suffer from the most mysterious sickness. They boot up, then after a little while the disk access increases, and it continues to increase until the machine is deadlocked. In my many years in IT and in the history og Windows XP, I have never experienced so many problems at once. Windows XP has always been pretty stable and reliable, and now that Vista sales are lagging, XP performs worse than ever. I know that people will yell at me for acting paranoid, but hey, M$ has created this state in people themselves by using every trick known to mandkind to get further ahead, so no I wouldn't but anything past them anymore! I have had a few people tell me that they have updated to Vista because it gave them better performance on their exsistent hardware!! anyone who has ever used Vista know that, that's not possible !! P.S. If I dissapear, You know who did it!! Cheers, Michael

Feed Vonage Says There Is No Workaround To Verizon's VoIP Patents (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed on Monday April 16, 2007 @03:33PM

After a jury sided with Verizon in its patent-infringment case against it, Vonage told customers and investors not to worry, because it was developing a workaround that would allow it to continue operating without infringing upon any of the patents in question. However, the company has now confirmed that there is no such workaround, and it's not certain that one would be feasible, given the breadth of the Verizon patents. It's filing for a permanent stay of the injunction against it, apparently with the hope that the appeals process will work out in its favor. If that move isn't successful, it's going to be awfully hard for the company to stay in business. Seeing the stay denied would be a dream scenario for Verizon, since the patents in question are so broad that it's conceivable it could be impossible to run a landline-replacement VoIP service in the US without infringing upon them -- meaning it could shut down the entire US VoIP industry and the stiff competition it provides the company's traditional phone services. Verizon's not the only company rubbing its hands gleefully, either. The whole VoIP space is so patented up that it's under threat not just from entrenched rivals who would like to see its growth stymied, but by companies that have done little to bring their innovations to market and are looking to make a quick buck.

Submission + - Circuit City to fire thousands, demand cheap labor

Submitted by

rahga

on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @04:15PM

rahga writes: "It's the dumbest move I've seen a tech retailer make recently... Circuit City will fire 3,400 employees, then offer them and others their job back if they are willing to go back to entry-level pay, from $11 to around $8. Justification is that they've been paying well over market values. In other words, they are now demanding salespeople that are as clueless as the guys in Wal-Mart's electronics department."

Submission + - Trash powered Electricity

Submitted by

Jarik C-Bol

on Wednesday March 28, 2007 @11:27AM

Jarik C-Bol writes: "http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0 110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html Popular Science has a report on a machine that uses plasma to render anything short of nuclear waste down to is base elements, and use the results to drive generators that produce more power than the machine uses. Its creator has big plans to save the world, one landfill at a time. Hopes are that once in place, we will solve our garbage problems, and be producing cheep easy electricity from the junk we throw away. Here's to hoping, maybe this one will pan out, according to the article, it is being implemented in several cities across the country."

Submission + - Where to Submit Articles (for Pay)?

Submitted by

Shlomi Fish

on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @06:19PM

Shlomi Fish writes: "I'm an open-source software developer, and write technical articles, technical or non-technical essays, and some blog entries. I've been writing articles for O'ReillyNet for payment (and for Freshmeat.net for T-shirts), but been often set back by the lack of the responsiveness of some of the editors there. (They are busy after all).

Can anyone recommend some online publications they had a good experience with, which will pay for submissions? I'm relatively flexible, and can accept most editorial changes, but really need good responsiveness. Note that I'm a technical person and knows programming and computers inside and out."

Submission + - UFO Crash in Somalia

Submitted by maekelae on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @03:51PM

maekelae writes: " A baffling device which resembles a satellite or Unidentified Flying Object (U.F.O) has landed in a rural area close to Buulo-Burde town, 220km north of the Somalia capital Mogadishu, eyewitnesses told Shabelle radio on Monday. " Read more at http://somalinet.com/news/world/Somalia/8920

Submission + - Illegal White House Email Causing Security Risk?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26, 2007 @05:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: Has White House email policy broken the law and endangered national security? Hold on, this gets complicated. While investigating what happened during the recent firing of eight federal prosecutors, it was revealed that much of the email from the White House were not using official government servers, but using servers provided by the Republican National Committee. (One of these serves was named 'GWB43.com'.) It was also reported that Karl Rove does 95% of his email on these non-governmental accounts.

This raises two critical issues: first, does this violate the Presidential Records Act, passed after Nixon and Watergate? Second, does this create a potential security breach? How much security does the RNC maintain, compared to the White House? There is also the issue of people on the White House payroll doing work for the RNC on government time, another potential law-breaker.

Henry Waxman, D-CA, wants to know what is going on. He has sent a letters to the RNC and the Bush-Cheney campaign to preserve there emails for congressional investigation. http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/26/rnc-emails-wax man/

For comments on security see http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/005879.html and http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002875.php.

All these websites are extremely partisan. Let the Flame Wars begin!

Submission + - Backing Up Your Photos, Videos, and Music

Submitted by knuckleduster on Monday March 26, 2007 @04:28PM

knuckleduster writes: I'm trying to create a backup schedule at home for my Photos, Videos, and Music. I'm looking at 75+ GBs of data that I want to store out of my house in a bank safe deposit box. I know the simplest solution would be to buy an external hard drive, do a straight copy and be done with it. But that would mean two trips to the bank each month (one to pickup the drive, do my backup and one to drop off the drive, unless I buy two). I'd like to do this with minimal expense and I already have a DVD writer and many DVD-RWs. I'd like to use them to create a master Full backup, then just follow up with Incrementals each month. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a suggestion for a good Windows-based backup software? I've tried Nero, but it seems to error after numerous spanned discs. I tried Genie's home software but it seems to want the Full backup before doing an Incremental. I also thought of trying iTunes built-in backup for the music, ACDSee's built-in back up for the photos, and who knows what for the videos. Bad idea? What say you? My first Slashdot post so please be gentle. Thanks for the help!

Submission + - Washington state encourages Internet sales tax

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Friday March 23, 2007 @12:40PM

prostoalex writes: "Washington state Governor signed a tax bill encouraging out of state businesses to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Washington state residents. It should be noted, though, that Washington state does not collect personal income tax, and hence relies on state sales tax for 53.1% of its revenues."

Submission + - Vonage ordered to halt calls to standard phone lin

Submitted by Frying Ferret on Friday March 23, 2007 @12:35PM

Frying Ferret writes: Bloomberg is reporting that Vonage has been found to be infringing on 3 of Verizon's patents. The judge has ordered Vonage to halt internet calls to standard phone lines.

Submission + - What do you do when you can't afford a SAN?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14, 2007 @06:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: What's the next best solution to having a full SAN setup for central data storage? Setting up an enterprise level SAN is so expensive that the company I work for wants to know what other solutions there are to this situation. NAS is cool for at home, but would it work for a high trafficked website? I don't know of any self contained NAS solutions that offer data redundancy. The only way I can think of to get that would be to have an actual server with RAID set up on the disks. I have searched the web, reading white papers and other material, but I would like to hear from the horse's mouth what works best and is easiest to set up. One thing to keep in mind, and I know many /. readers will not like this but, we are in a Windows environment, and the gears that turn will not be able to change this.

Submission + - Trend Micro Buys HijackThis

Submitted by Mo's Mountain on Wednesday March 14, 2007 @06:08PM

Mo's Mountain writes: ZDNet has a story about Trend Micro's acquisition of HijackThis, the freeware spyware-removal program preferred by security pros. A new new HijackThis 2.0 beta version is available for free with an "AnalyzeThis" function that allows users to see how prevalent the threats detected on their computers are when compared to other HijackThis users. Trend Micro also released a rival Web safety ratings service similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor.

Submission + - Promising Fusion Research Snuffed Out

Submitted by

Stanistani

on Tuesday March 13, 2007 @10:15AM

Stanistani writes: "For 11 years physicist Robert Bussard quietly worked on Boron Fusion research for the U.S. Navy. Just as his experiments promised to bear fruit, the funding ran out, and an explosion in his laboratory put an emphatic end to his efforts. Now, in a Defense News article, the details of this fusion technology emerge, along with Bussard's claims that a remarkably small amount of funding could finish the job and deliver a working fusion reactor decades ahead of competing efforts — a reactor that runs on Boron and produces electricity directly — without radiation."

Submission + - Politician Posts site in Klingon

Submitted by GeePrime on Monday March 12, 2007 @12:37PM

GeePrime writes: It looks as though a Finnish MP is trying to get votes by adding a new language to his web site: Klingon. His site can be found here. This has a potential to hurt him badly, as some might see he doesn't take politics seriously. What are everyone else's thoughts?

Submission + - Modern Day Witch-Hunt in Connecticut

Submitted by zhenya00 on Monday February 26, 2007 @05:05PM

zhenya00 writes: USAToday is reporting on a story most of us are already familiar with; the case of Julie Amero, a 40 year old Norwich, Connecticut substitute teacher who has been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor when the un-patched Windows 98 computer she had used to check her email began to display a flurry of pornographic pop-ups to the students in her classroom. She faces up to 40 years in prison when she is sentenced this Friday March 2.
From the article:

"Julie Amero was a victim of a school that couldn't be bothered to protect its computers, of a prosecutor without the technology background to understand what he was doing, a police "expert" who was not, and a jury misled by all of them. "Miscarriage of justice" doesn't begin to describe it."
Can this country really allow something like this to happen? Why isn't there general outrage on the front page of every newspaper? Why aren't those responsible being flooded with calls and emails from angry citizens?

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