> Microsoft now says that its November Windows updates are not causing
> the BlackSOD: "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate
> and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently
> released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."

"We know those reports are inaccurate because we already knew about this before releasing the November updates and so it couldn't possibly be related to the November updates. It is an issue that we are having considerable difficulties fixing hence not being fixed in the November updates and hoped that nobody would have commented about it so soon."

I wonder if this means that if a scientist implanted this sort of implant into an animal that we would be able to figure out what it is thinking.

Never believe something until it is officially denied. :o)

> What the hell was the legal team doing?

Intimidating customers who had installed more than one copy of MS Windows?

Rearranging deck chairs on the Digital Restrictions Management palava?

> Microsoft 7 legally contains GPL code.

Excellent. That means that Microsoft Windows is now GPL'd software. :o)

Are you sure that your statement is correct?

Hi,

In general terms I'm curious to learn a little more about this.

How long ago did you stop working for Microsoft? For how long were you working for that corporation? And in general terms why did you decide to stop working for Microsoft?

The reason why I am asking is so that I can get a feel for the validity of your statement about the coding culture amongst people working for Microsoft.

If Microsoft can demonstrate a causal link between known pirated copies of it's flawed insecure OS, then why can't MS prosecute those pirates?

If I can't prove that any particular infected copy was pirated then it's merely spouting rubbish to defend the poor security of it's software.

> "Like many recent college grads, Steven Lee finds himself
> unemployed in one of the roughest job markets in decades
> and saddled with a big pile of debt -- he owes about $84,000
> in student loans for undergrad and grad school.

He should count himself lucky that he's only got an $85,000 student debt.

I know of people who have well over $100,000 student debt as their Veterinarian course fees were hideously expensive.

If you want to check out an Open Source application that is well on the way to being a Sharepoint killer check out SilverStripe.

http://silverstripe.org/

Lots of plugins and extensions already, available for all three platforms (Linux, MacOS, and Microsoft) and yet still under active development. :o)

Its actually a website CMS, but many of the extensions effectively make it much more than merely a _very_ easy-to-use CMS. :o)

It appears that Mozilla wants to swap out a standard, stable, well organised and well known cross-platform GUI with one that requires more CPU effort, is confusing and inconsistent.

Personally, I thought that Mozilla had more common sense than to use the MS Office Ribbon, and I don't consider the Mozilla GUI to be out of date, and neither does it look out of date. It just doesn't look like MS Office - and that fact is a good thing!

> The Google book deal has received considerable attention but
> for the most part it has been negative.

Surely most of the general public has viewed this Google project as a positive thing. Only large multinational corporations such as the large publishing houses, the RIAA [sic], Sony, and Microsoft (with their copyright and DRM interests) are the ones squeeling about Google making a fair-use amount of a book available for a reader to peruse.

Lets face it, MP3s make it easy for listeners to decide in a fair-use way if an album is worth buying (much like walking into a shop and asking to listen to the album). Fair-use viewing of a book is much the same as standing in the store and flipping through the book.

> On the bright side, it includes math showing that the total damages from
> copyright infringement by children in the US amount to a measly $7.8 million.

How does the RIAA know that "children" have made $7.8 million American dollars worth of illegal copies of music?

Heh heh. Why doesn't the RIAA sue all those children for those known copyright infringements?

I mean, Its already tried to sue people with no Internet connections.

Surely if anything, this would make children more aware than before that they are able to make copies of CDs.

> I don't understand why they're dragging their feet, as sooner or later something
> installs a listening service (or the user already has such a service) and it's over.

The reason why MS is dragging its feet is that by not patching MS Windows XP/v5 there will be less of a reason for users to not move onto MS Windows v7.

> Due to the cross platform requirements of firefox and safari, they'd
> implement their own event loops, which on a windows system
> would involve more wake ups per second.

So what we've got here, is IE8 showing the benefits of one browser using highly platform specific system calls in a way that other browsers do not or cannot use for one reason or another.

Looks like the Microsoft Desktop Monopoly hitting the browser market again.

I didn't realise that browsers regulated laptop battery life.

I thought battery life was controlled by the Operating System regulating such things as CPU clock speed on that particular computer.

Or is this report really talking about how many CPU clock cycles a browser uses to render a page?

If so then the report should be re-written to say what it means. As it stands the headline appears to be misleading.