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Comment Re:This is kind of stupid/obvious (Score 1) 638

Software isn't everything. The hardware is fairly "walled garden", one can't just buy any 86x computer, and install MacOSX on it. One has to buy the computer from Apple. Windows can be installed on (or bought) a extremely high number of computers compared to MacOSX. It can even be installed on computers that one builds from parts from entirely different manufacturers. (Linux can do this all to and even more.)
Microsoft

Internet Explorer 10 Drops Vista Support 438

Pigskin-Referee writes "This week at Microsoft's MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 available — less than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer: the next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista. Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won't even run on Vista."
Privacy

Submission + - Smartphone Users Feel More Secure Than PC Users (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: Many users feel more secure using smartphones to surf the Internet than PCs, and a majority consider the risk of losing personal data higher on computers than on smartphones, according to Kaspersky Lab. 1,600 smartphone users were surveyed in Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain. There has been a recent increase in the number of attacks on mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, and experts expect to see considerably more of these in the future. Despite this, users in Europe, according to the Kaspersky Lab survey, feel more secure accessing the Internet via a mobile device.
Crime

Submission + - Servers Breached at Fortune 100 Company (net-security.org)

Orome1 writes: The Connecticut-based Hartford Financial Services Group — a Fortune 100 company and one of the largest investment and insurance companies in the US — has suffered a breach that resulted in password-stealing Trojans being installed on a number of the company's servers. A number of servers were compromised, including the Citrix servers which the employees use to access the company systems from a remote location.

Submission + - Are Video Game Makers Becoming Responsible? (commondreams.org)

musth writes: "With NFL 12, industry acknowledges gameplay depictions of head concussions influence RL behavior of young men — so why not likewise with sexual and violent behavior, one wonders....could it be the millions of dollars in violent video games, ya think?"
Government

Submission + - Utah Repeals Anti-Transparency Law (sltrib.com)

oddjob1244 writes: After enduring two weeks of public fury, Utah lawmakers voted Friday to repeal a bill that would have restricted public access to government records. While Senate President Michael Waddoups accused the media of lobbying on the issue and others blamed the press for biased coverage that turned citizens against them, Sen. Steve Urquhart said bluntly: "We messed up. It is nobody's fault but our's."

Michael Waddoups is indirectly blaming Slashdot from previous media coverage: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/23/202234/Utah-Works-To-Repeal-Anti-Transparency-Law and http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/15/1647251/Utah-Governor-Honored-With-Blackhole-Award

Idle

Submission + - Ohio man gets a $16.4 million cable bill (yahoo.com)

wiredmikey writes: You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000...

In this case an Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, and he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million.

NASA

NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers 148

Hugh Pickens writes "MIT Technology Review reports that various ideas have been floated for removing space junk, most of them hugely expensive, but now James Mason at NASA Ames Research Center has come up with the much cheaper option of zapping individual pieces of junk with a ground-based laser, to slow them down so that they eventually de-orbit. Mason estimates that a device to test the reversal of the Kessler syndrome could be put together for a million dollars, which would have to be shared by many space-faring nations, to avoid the inevitable legal issues that using such a device would raise. 'The scheme requires launching nothing into space — except photons (PDF) — and requires no on-orbit interaction — except photon pressure. It is thus less likely to create additional debris risk in comparison to most debris removal schemes,' writes Mason. 'Eventually the concept may lead to an operational international system for shielding satellites and large debris objects from a majority of collisions as well as providing high accuracy debris tracking data and propellant-less station keeping for smallsats.'"

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