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Comment Re:Go buy a boat and retire. (Score 2) 387

by Valdier (#44255601) Attached to: Steve Ballmer Reorganizing Microsoft

That isn't the succession of Windows Naming btw... You may not have been around for it all though.

MS-DOS 1.25, 2.0, Version 2.1, Version 2.11, 3.0, Version 3.1, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 6.2, 6.21, 6.22 (Just major version changes)
Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11
Win95 -> Win98 ->WinMe
NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, Win 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 (Windows Server is also in this chain)

That is the actual OS chain to be accurate... and Win95 and Windows could be argued to be in the DOS chain

Comment There was a series of kids books... (Score 1) 623

by Valdier (#43851117) Attached to: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I can't remember what they were called, but every quarter the schools would pass out these book ordering forms and inside them was a series of books that featured a kid named Orion.

The books were kids adventure novels, but the unique part about the book was that every chapter or two the kid would come across a clue and for you to "learn" what the clue was, you had to type in a basic program and execute it on your computer. This would reveal whatever the answer was and they were generally pretty short 20 lines or so. But having done this for 10 or so books I really looked forward more to the little programs than I did the books after a while. They started me down the line of figuring out what these programs did in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe

Comment I can't be the only one that thinks this... (Score 1) 953

by Valdier (#43519591) Attached to: Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade

She has had 12 years to save $10,000.

As a doctor, if she can't save $1,000 a year for a system she *knows* she has to upgrade (surprise, windows has a support life cycle), then she really is pretty irresponsible to begin with.

She is lucky MS gave 12-13 years of support on this OS in the first place (that is a really long time for them). My advice: Take responsibility for your own mistakes.
Security

Submission + - Behavior Matters, Botnetz/Command & Control (batblue.com)

Submitted by
JohnBert
JohnBert writes: "A great deal has been made lately about Botnetz and Command & Control (C&C) Architecture and for good reason. They are wily and today pose the greatest challenge to organizational security.

Botnetz and C&C tend to be hard to detect via signature approaches due to a number of factors. These include:

        The large number of unique and one-off botz that operate as Zero day (no known signatures)
        Use of Droppers for payload delivery. Droppers are pre-bot applications that are not malicious, but are used to retrieve the malicious applications based on some criteria.
        Use of hard to detect algorithms to select predetermined fresh download points that thwart IP reputation systems.
        Leveraging encrypted communications to bypass perimeter defenses and retain anonymity

All of this makes Botnetz/C&Cs very difficult to detect. Even if your organization has invested in tools specifically geared to identify such, Botmasters leverage their agility to adapt to static techniques used by these tools.

Follow link to story to read more!"
Firefox

Submission + - Firefox 12 released, introduces silent, Chrome-like updater (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Firefox 12 has been officially released, with only one major new feature: A silent, background updater. Now you will have to approve the Firefox Software Updater when you first install Firefox, but after that the browser will update silently — just like Chrome. In other news, the Find feature now reliably centers the page on any matches — hooray!"
Games

Submission + - Best ways to waste time at the office?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've been working for myself for over ten years and just got a "real" desk job. I like it — it's great actually — but there are certain times when it's unbearably slow. I'm in a tight space, it's easy for others to see my screen, and I don't want to be obviously wasting time. (i.e. by having a giant blue Facebook logo across my browser...) People don't come right up and peer over my shoulder but they can see into the workspace from a ways away.

I'm thinking of the modern day equivalent of a dirty magazine that's inside an issue of the New Yorker. Are there any sites that can unbrand a website? Can I use a tool (sort of like Firebug) that would allow me to personalize a page to the point that it's not recognizable form across a room?

Or are there small, non-intrusive games that could run in a small, easily hidden window?

I know there are some out there who will say "there's always something to do" but genuinely, things get slow and reading the news, checking some social networking sites, or playing a game to pass the time would be awesome.

Any suggestions? How do YOU make the hours working for the Man more bearable?
Novell

Novell Bringing .Net Developers To Apple iPad 315

Posted by timothy from the odd-confluence dept.
GMGruman writes "Paul Krill reports that Apple's new iPad could be easier to write apps for, thanks to Novell's MonoTouch development platform, which helps .Net developers create code for the iPad and fully comply with Apple's licensing requirements — without having to use Apple's preferred Objective-C. This news falls on the footsteps of news that Citrix will release an iPad app that lets users run Windows sessions on the iPad. These two developments bolster an argument that the iPad could eventually displace the netbook."
Media

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
Programming

What Does Everyone Use For Task/Project Tracking? 428

Posted by timothy from the tribal-tattoos-mostly dept.
JerBear0 writes "I work as the sole IT employee at a company of about 50 people. I handle programming, support, pretty much anything that is IT related, or even that plugs in. As seems to be true with many small companies, the priorities seem to shift quite frequently. As a result, I've always got multiple programming (both new systems and improvements/changes to existing systems), integration, research, maintenance tasks/projects on my To Do list, in varying stages of completion. At any given time, I need to be able to jump back to one of these items and pick up where I left off. I am currently using Outlook Tasks, and then end up referencing my notebook and email for those dates to figure out exactly where I left off. It works, but not well. If it's been a while, I'll end up losing an hour or two just tracking everything down. I looked at using MS Project / OpenProj, but they want an individual file for each project, and I want at least the project/task list all on one screen. Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization. Ideally it would be a desktop app, but a locally-hostable web app would be okay. In some of these projects I may want to include proprietary information, which I really don't want floating out in the cloud outside of my control. I know I'm not alone in this problem, so what do you guys (gals) use to address this?"
Communications

Nerve-tapping Neckband Allows 'Telepathic' Chat 205

Posted by samzenpus from the mouth-of-cyber-sauron dept.
ZonkerWilliam writes "Newscientist has an interesting article on tapping the nerve impulses going from the brain to the vocal chords, allowing for 'Voiceless' phone calls. "With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerized voice." It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close."
Power

Multiple Sites Down In SF Power Outage 423

Posted by kdawson from the or-was-it-a-drunk dept.
corewtfux writes with word of a major outage apparently centered on 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District. Valleywag initially claimed that a drunken person had gotten in and damaged 40 racks, but an update from Technorati's Dave Sifry says the problem is a widespread power outage. Sites affected include Technorati, Netflix (these display nice "We're Dead" pages), Typepad, LiveJournal, Sun.com, and Craigslist (these just time out).
United States

Truck-Mounted Laser Guns 370

Posted by kdawson from the sharks-with-wheels dept.
bl8n8r writes "Boeing has announced a contract with the US Army to develop laser cannons that are to be mounted atop 20-ton trucks for the purpose of shooting down incoming artillery, rockets, mortars, or bombs. The High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator project actually shoots stuff instead of just painting a mark on a target for other armament to hit."

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