If you're destroying drives on your own, go for it. But in any kind of business, even if you don't have some old motherboard with an IDE connector, it's worth spending the $20 on an adapter or card to just DBAN those crappy old drives.

Why? Solely to prevent someone from injuring themselves while destroying old hard drives with a drill, which is bad in itself. It's worse when they bill the company for the ER visit because a spark gets in their eye. It gets even worse when they go on perfectly collectible workers comp and settle a lawsuit because they weren't given safety goggles when they did so.

Or, more realistically, some manager or person in HR from chewing you out for an hour and writing you up just because they think that way, and you allowed it to happen. And even that will probably not happen, but do always CYA just in case.

I was about to post this myself, but DBAN will do the trick. There's practically no way anyone will recover anything but a few random strings of plain text out of that, and that's only if they have the analog tools in a forensics lab. Even the chance of reconstructing a usable credit card account out of that is in the same probability range as guesswork.

But I will say that your estimate of 200GB is pretty low for what's worth re-using unless you're broke. Any drive that's been in use for 3-5 years is well past warranty and isn't really worth putting anything valuable on without a sensible backup and recovery scheme. Any drive 200GB in size (unless it's SSD, etc) is usually at least that old, I had a 200GB drive personally in early 2003. A brand new 1TB drive will only run $55.

(I of course agree that throwing fresh 3TB drives into tubs of driveway cleaner simply to "100% wipe data" would be absolutely stupid.)

As for legality, extreme legacy software and hardware is still often used in industrial plants. The claims against MSFT for purposefully wiping one of those systems and shutting down the lines for weeks would be huge.

Whoever wrote that is probably smarter than thinking doing that will just wipe some old Pentium 2's still out in the wild that'll get replaced with a Win7 laptop the next time a social security check is cashed.

And remember, Code Red/Green are 10 years old. :)

Wikipedia: The Code Red worm was a computer worm observed on the Internet on July 13, 2001.
Securelist: Net-Worm.Win32.CodeGreen.a, Detected: Sep 14 2001 09:23 GMT
Microsoft: Patch Q300972, [fix] Originally posted: June 18, 2001

I would agree with this if this was posted sometime circa 2005 or before, but that really isn't the case now.

This malware and others like it can only take over if you open an e-mail, go to a bad website, download a bad executable, and run it. Let's break that down.

E-Mail: Any credible ISP and any web-based e-mail service (Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail) will filter botnet spam. Even if you find said botnet e-mail in your spam folder and try to go to it, any modern web or desktop e-mail client will still warn you like hell.

Browser: Internet Explorer 8 has a malware filter enabled by default (SmartScreen). You get a horrible warning if you try to access malware, and an even worse one if you try to download an executable flagged as malware. IE8 is freely available for XP users, and every mainstream website in the world (including MSFT's) will nag you to upgrade, as most (Youtube/Facebook/Google) don't even support XP's default of IE6 anymore.

OS/User Access: Windows Vista is nearly 5 years old now and included proper user-mode access to the system (UAC) by default. Try to run something that will do something horrible like Kelihos will, and it will also flag a less dangerous-looking, but existent "do not run this" warning. That was improved with Windows 7, which is now 2 years old.

Patches on XP: Anything since XP SP2 (August 2004?) will not only nag for Windows update, but even forcibly reboot your system after enough idle time if what needs to be patched could open the door for botnets. Like with any of the years before listed, any retail PC sold since then will have that. Patches on XP won't fix everything, but the patches (Malicious Software Removal Tool) will typically circumvent well-known botnets.

Conclusion: I would say almost the entirety of the 41,000 systems affected had somehow went ridiculously unpatched for years. We're probably talking Windows 2000 systems. And Linux/BSD was always better as a baseline, but run it unpatched at any such similar level as described, and it will have even worse SSH server vulnerabilities for starters.

I would agree with this if this was posted sometime in circa 2005, or especially circa 2002, but that really isn't the case now.

This malware can only take over if you go to a bad website, download a bad executable, and run it.

Internet Explorer 8 has a malware filter named SmartScreen. You get a horrible warning if you try to access malware, and an even worse one if you try to download an executable of malware. IE8 is freely available, and every mainstream website in the world (including MSFT's) will nag you to upgrade, as most (Youtube/Facebook/Google) don't even support IE6 anymore.

Windows Vista is nearly 5 years old now and included proper user-mode access, named UAC, by default. Try to run something that will do something horrible like Kelihos will, and it will also flag a less flagrant, but existent "do not run this" warning. That was improved with Windows 7, which is now 2 years old.

And as far as patches go, anything since XP SP2 (August 2004?) will not only nag for Windows update, but even forcibly reboot your system after enough idle time if what needs to be patched could open the door for botnets.

I would say almost the entirety of the 41,000 systems affected had somehow went unpatched for years. A number were likely Windows 2000 or even 98 boxes somehow still out in the wild and online.

Firefox was really the browser that broke the internet out of MSFT's painful grip. There is good cause for brand loyalty there.

In the early 2000's, Internet Explorer 5 and 6 had nearly 90% of the browser market share. The only real competitors were Opera, which was basically adware at the time, and Mozilla Suite, which still felt like a re-branding of the godawful 90's Netscape browser even though it used the Gecko engine.

When Firefox came out in the 0.x stages around early 2003 (named Phoenix then Firebird), it was out of this world. It was free. It was insanely fast. It rendered old quirky pages as well as IE did, and supported open and well-documented standards for future projects. Best of all, it was secure -- unlike with IE, you wouldn't get rooted and spyware'd to death from ActiveX garbage.

But times changed. I switched to Chrome well over a year ago and haven't really looked back. It's just too quick and bloat-free in native speed, UI navigation, and especially versus the damned updates Firefox has. Sadly, I'd almost consider the test version of Internet Explorer 10 to be a better browser...

Thomas Aquinas, SUMMA THEOLOGICA, 1265 AD: “Among the philosophical sciences one is speculative the other practical [natural philosophy], nevertheless sacred doctrine [Roman Catholicism] includes both; as God, by one and the same science, knows both Himself and His works.”

This basically states that if you are understanding science properly, you are understanding God's works properly. And conversely, if you understand God's works, you will let science progress to understand God's works, as God and science are one in the same.

That compromise in thinking eventually led to the Renaissance.

Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.

A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.

But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.

This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.

When it comes to art, particularly in the realms of entertainment, if it's not in the public domain, it's private property. And includes everything that has to do with private property.

I owned the original Mona Lisa, I could spray-paint it, toss it in a fire, or do whatever else I please with it. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, there are no laws whatsoever about such things with your own property.

Of course, like Lucas, I would be eternally unpopular and infamous for doing such a thing.

Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.

Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.

My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.

And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.

Just dial 9.1.1.1!

Or in the IPv6 world, 0009:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001:0001.

After all, for the past 10 years, slashdot has been predicting that we'll be using bacteria, vodka, and other primitive elements to power our laptops non-stop for days.

http://slashdot.org/story/01/11/15/1914208/Methanol-Fuel-Cell-Battery-For-Your-Laptop
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/10/17/1630245/Fuel-Cell-Laptop-announced-by-Toshiba
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/03/25/0056230/Enzyme-Bio-Battery-Runs-on-Ethanol
http://slashdot.org/story/03/06/07/2110231/DoCoMo-Will-Launch-Fuel-Cell-Mobile-Phones-By-2005
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/09/08/113239/Bacteria-Powered-Batteries
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/06/03/11/1745258/Laptop-Fuel-Cells-Coming-Soon
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/0110232/Potato-Powered-Batteries-Debut

As with the "Year of the Linux Desktop", I'll believe it when I see it.

The fact that NetLogic has patents that would take 5 years for Broadcom to rival makes it a very worthwhile investment.

But I found those that first link very informative however. All investors do need to read that, especially with the ongoing lawsuit.

What the article doesn't point out is that is that there is a strong possibility of a class-action lawsuit on the payouts of shares, as the Board of Directors of NETL did not properly hold the sales process and shop it out.

It seems that $50 for what was a $30 share a few days ago is quite generous, but there's a rather long legal history of boards that breach their fiduciary duties getting into serious legal trouble.

The fact that something like a dozen law firms are already trying to get involved the second this happened shows something is quite fishy about it. Some snippets from google news:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/harwood-feffer-llp-announces-investigation-of-netlogic-microsystems-inc-2011-09-12
http://www.pr-inside.com/netlogic-microsystems-inc-takeover-under-r2806236.htm
http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20110912006442/en/netlogic/NASDAQ%3A-NETL/netl