435958
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
The army is integrating Macs into its information systems after a rough year of security infiltrations. Apple X Serves are becoming common in military data centers — "Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off," said General Steve Boutelle, the army's chief information officer.
353129
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Following in the tradition of his past articles, John Siracusa writes a lengthy technical review of Mac OS X Leopard, covering updates to the kernel, 64-bit, Time Machine, the Finder (did they FTFF?), and more.
173559
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
A BSA survey shows a 24% drop in illegal downloading in the last three years among 8 to 18 year olds. Fear of parental reprisal rose 40% in the last three years to reach #4 on the list of fears involved with illegal downloading, topped by receiving a virus, getting into legal trouble, and accidentally installing spyware.
169613
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Microsoft's figure of 40 million Vista OEM licenses sold has less impact when weighed against the expanded size of the PC market, according to IDC numbers. The myriad of factors involved in determining success in the market makes Microsoft's constant comparisons to Windows XP less reliable as a growth indicator — particularly with Microsoft refusing to reveal the number of actual activated Vista licenses.
148183
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
It turns out Microsoft's previously reported quarter numbers are inflated due to deterred revenues from last quarter. Without the deferred revenue, Microsoft's revenue growth would have been 17%, in line with past growth. Though revenue from last quarter was held back "for accounting reasons," one effect is to make Vista and Office revenues look more impressive.
132123
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Citing development on the iPhone, Apple has officially delayed OS X Leopard to October. The company plans to ship a "feature complete" version to developers at the WWDC in June. Is Leopard becoming Apple's Vista? Apple's press release claims it will be "worth the wait."
131727
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
"Previous Versions" is a feature of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate that uses Shadow Copy to allow users to restore past versions of a file like Apple's Time Machine. It turns out Vista Home also makes file backups but does not allow the user to access them. This means you automatically lose 15 percent of your drive to backups you can't access until you upgrade to Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate. Worse yet, disabling the "Previous Versions" service also disables System Restore and removes all restore points.
117197
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Vista's sales numbers don't add up according to Joe Wilcox of Microsoft-Watch. Going through the numbers and citing NPD, Gartner, and IDC, Wilcox describes the difference between licenses sold to manufacturers and actual consumer purchases, noting that there haven't been 20 million PCs sold since Jan. 30, contrary to Microsoft's numbers. In fact, only 3 million PCs have been sold since the start of the year.
103508
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
More documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considers Mac users its "guinea pigs" for new Office features, and they once considered dropping Mac Office entirely, "as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately." This case has become a treasure trove of internal memos describing Microsoft's internal business practices of the last ten years.
90566
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
The former editor of New Scientist has written an article in the TimesOnline on the U.N.'s recent global warming report, noting several underreported trends it doesn't account for, such as increasing sea-ice in the Southern Ocean. He describes an experiment by Henrik Svensmark showing a relation between atmospheric cloudiness and atomic particles coming in from exploded stars. In the basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, Svensmark's team showed that electrons from cosmic rays caused cloud condensation. Svensmark's scenario apparently predicts several unexplained temperature trends from the warmer trend of the 20th century to the temporary drop in the 1970s, attributed to changes in the sun's magnetic field affecting the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
57314
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Microsoft's security response center has announced a second Microsoft Word vulnerability caused by malformed data structures that lead to memory corruption. The flaws were discovered in actual attacks out in the wild and cover versions of Word from 2000 to 2003.
25610
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Apple has done it again and beaten Dell on price. The equivalent 15-inch Dell Precision laptop is almost $1000 more expensive, and when comparing 17-inch laptops, the high-end MacBook Pro is almost $1500 less expensive. It appears that Apple is now committed to competing not only on features and style, but on price.
24530
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Apple developers can now sign up for the Leopard Early Starter Kit and watch WWDC '06 sessions through iTunes. The page goes into Leopard's new features for developers, including XCode 3.0, Core Animation, the Xray profiler built on Sun's DTrace, resolution-independence, the adoption of TrustedBSD's Mandatory Access Control framework, and more. And this is just the stuff they're showing us!
20709
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Microsoft is touting the power-saving features of Vista, including Vista's ability to enter sleep mode. Dean DeWhitt, Windows kernel director, explains for everyone that "this is energy (consumed) when you are not even using the PC. It truly is a waste." In Windows XP, programs can cancel the sleep process and keep the computer running, draining a user's laptop battery, but Vista plans to change that. From the article: "By adding the new sleep option, businesses can wake machines to install security updates, while letting them remain in the power-saving mode the rest of the time." No word on whether this so-called "sleep mode" will appear in competing operating systems.
18293
submission
Overly Critical Guy writes:
Microsoft has made changes to Vista's EULA and added several usage restrictions. For instance, Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives, can't run in a virtualized environment, and can only share files and printers to a maximum of 5 network devices. Ultimate users can share with up to 10 devices and can run in a virtual environment but without access to DRM-protected content.
