16665310
submission
Julie188 writes:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office asked for public input on how it should use the Supreme Court's Bilski decision to guide it when granting new patents. Not surprisingly, Red Hat took them up on it. The USPTO should use Bilski and the fact that the machine transformation test is "important" to Just Say No to most software patents, it advised. Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, is hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation. I guess he didn't see this story last week Patent Office Ramps Up Patent Approvals.
16609860
submission
Julie188 writes:
How about this for a warm fuzzy, feel good story? IT manager Wade Stankich yanked out Windows Server, replaced it with Linux servers and said good-bye to reboots and unscheduled downtime. But when he tried to do the same with the desktops, replacing Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org, the end users rose up in revolt. So he and his team have built an infrastructure that gives everyone their favorite operating system. He's running Ubuntu 9.1x on nearly all of the company's 20-odd servers and Windows XP on the desktops of roughly 80 clients (although the IT folks use Linux desktops, too). He also unplugged the Cisco Call Manager blade server and replaced it with open source Asterisk. He's cut his IT budget by two-thirds and the moral of the story is that his infrastructure isn't just cheaper, it's more reliable too, he says.
16569476
submission
Julie188 writes:
That was probably the only time "DNS" will ever be a trending term on Twitter . The cause was Facebook's 2.5 hour outage on Thursday, which incorrectly told users trying tp access the site that a DNS error was to blame. In truth, experts who've read Facebook's explanation say that the site went down because Facebook gave itself a distributed denial-of-service attack when a system admin misconfigured a database. So why was DNS blamed? The 27-year-old communications protocol has been known to cause other, somewhat similar outages.
16297470
submission
Julie188 writes:
If you've often thought that using a carrier pigeon would be faster than the download speeds of the local ISP in some rural areas, you've been officially proven right. At least in the U.K. Ten birds strapped with USB memory sticks were released from a farm somewhere in Yorkshire aimed for Skegness 75 miles (120km) away, while at the same time a five-minute video upload was set off. Guess who won the race?
16229576
submission
Julie188 writes:
We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy. But Frank Ahearn, the so-called “Dear Abby” of disappearing; is attempting to show folks how to use those same technologies to regain your privacy, even helping you go as far as faking your own death. Ahearn is a professional skip-tracer who has hunted down people like Monica Lewinsky. In an interview with Ahearn on Network World he says, "One can legally disappear through the use of corporations and offshore corporations. The idea is to embrace technology and to become a virtual entity." My favorite tip is that New Zealand is the place to land once you leap off the grid. Not only is it far from most of the rest of the English speaking world, he says, but it also has great beaches.
15853724
submission
Julie188 writes:
As long as Microsoft exists, there will be those who believe it's the KGB of the open source world, secretly doing everything it can to destroy the free software movement in general and Linux in particular. Microsoft has made so many missteps in regards to open source that many FOSS developers understandably see the company as nothing but evil. But people who use use Microsoft products to run their businesses (pretty much all of the F500) would prefer it and other proprietary vendors find a better way to interact with open source projects than in a courtroom. That's what the now, one-year-old CodePlex Foundation is supposed to be doing — helping to guide/encourage proprietary software vendors into participating with open source projects. The CodePlex Foundation (not to be confused with the CodePlex source forge hosted by Microsoft) is not, technically, run by Microsoft, although Microsoft is its marquee financial sponsor and 'softies dominate its staff and advisory board ranks. So, what's its angle? In a Q&A on Network World, newly appointed technical director Stephen Walli discusses some hot-button topics. For instance: he doesn't think that the open source definition — or the OSI's licenses — need a major overhaul; He says patents are a necessary reality but "a patent isn't validated until the court battle is over" and "until we see proof of patent litigation materially effecting FOSS licensed projects and their participants, it's not a real discussion." He also notes that these days; "most software isn't created by software companies" but by users.
15778234
submission
Julie188 writes:
Target will begin selling Facebook's virtual currency as gift cards on September 5, becoming the first brick-and-mortar retailer to do so. Facebook Credit gift cards will be available in $15, $25 and $50 denominations at the retailer’s 1,750 stores. That's right, you can now spend real dollars to get fake ones so you can buy imaginary items for games like FarmVille, Bejeweled and 150 other FB games or apps. If that interests you, please contact me. I have some swamp land in Florida I'd like to show you ...
15720090
submission
Julie188 writes:
Did you know that the largest worksheet you could create in Excel 2003 would create a footprint of just under half an acre. (Arrange all of the 16 million cells in Excel 2003 and they would cover a sizable suburban lawn). But that wasn't big enough for Microsoft. With Excel 2007, it introduced a grid that could cover a 400-acre ranch. And that's puny compared to Excel 2010, which sports a footprint of 17 billion cells. The overhead associated with 17 billion cells is mind-boggling, says blogger Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen. "Sure, you can get a 64 bit machine and load it up with 8, 12, 16 gigabytes of RAM. But the underlying spreadsheet is not just double or quadruple the size of Excel 2003, it is over 1000 times larger." And this means that in some cases, Excel 2010 runs four-times slower than Excel 2003.
15390698
submission
Julie188 writes:
Using a $225,000 microscope, researchers have identified the key components of a protein called TRIM5a that destroys HIV in rhesus monkeys. The finding could lead to new TRIM5a-based treatments that would knock out HIV in humans, said senior researcher Edward M. Campbell, PhD, of Loyola University Health System.
15296880
submission
Julie188 writes:
A lawsuit in federal court alleges that several companies like Warner Bros. Records, Disney, Ustream and others "hacked the computers" of millions of consumers "to covertly, without consent, and in an unauthorized, deceptive, invasive, and fraudulent manner" implanted "rogue" Flash tracking cookies. The group referred to collectively as "Clearspring Flash Cookie Affiliates" are accused of spying on users, including kids, by intercepting online transmissions with tracking code, that even if the user deleted, would be used to "re-spawn" Flash cookies.
14659464
submission
Julie188 writes:
In the ongoing saga of GNOME 3.0, here's another delay. GNOME 3.0 was scheduled to be released in September but during the developers conference, GUADEC 2010 in Den Haag, the organization had to face facts: the much ballyhooed GNOME Shell really wasn't ready. The Shell is supposed to bring "a whole new user experience to the desktop." So now, in September, what users will see is GNOME 2.32, distributed as a new stable release. Next target date for 3.0: March 2011.
14645578
submission
Julie188 writes:
Calendaring performance issues in Microsoft Exchange have been growing over the past six weeks, due in part to a bug in the iPhone 4.0 operating system that effectively locked up access for mobile users, causing Exchange to slow to a crawl. That bug has caused users to begin reporting that other calendaring quirks are becoming more prevalent, particularly in Exchange 2010 but also in 2007. Users randomly find that their appointments have been deleted, or sometimes duplicated. The situation is especially bad for BlackBerry BIS users, users in mixed Windows/Mac environments, and when a user has a delegate that is authorized to add appointments on the user's behalf (such as an assistant to an executive). The delegate bug was so pronounced in Exchange 2010 that in June Microsoft issued a patch that supposedly fixed it, but users continue to report the issue haunting them. Network World has a big, fat article that documents the quirks/bugs and what admins can do to fix each of them.
14358746
submission
Julie188 writes:
Talk about ironic. SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin was one of a handful of people that helped coin and define the term "open source." Now he's explaining why SugarCRM's two new editions are not, technically, open source, even though the company does give users of those editions the source code and the freedom to modify it (but not distribute it). Augustin says there's no reason for the uproar over the fact that the FOSS version of SugarCRM doesn't include the nifty new user interface and other features included in the commercial versions because this is the same license strategy SugarCRM has always used.
14313802
submission
Julie188 writes:
Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, plans to release a software tool at the Black Hat conference later this month that he says could be used on about half the existing models of home routers, including most Linksys, Dell, and Verizon Fios or DSL versions. The tool apparently exploits the routers through DNS rebinding.
14285076
submission
Julie188 writes:
On this day, in 1992, version 0.1 of 386BSD (you might know it as Jolix) was released. Now, some might say March was the true birth date, as that was the original release of 386BSD, version 0.0. But it wasn't until the second, more usable, 386BSD release that users began developing unofficial patchkits to fix bugs and enhance aspects of the system. And that ushered in a new era of development.
