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Christmas Tree Made From 70 SCSI Hard Drives 248

Posted by samzenpus from the free-time dept.
Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Offers Windows Vista Ultimate For Free (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by marulez
marulez writes: Microsoft is providing free Vista edition for taking survey and giving feedback. Sign up for the chance to get free Vista. Go to the website provided at the end of this topic, and sign up for the chance to win.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft & Co Form Copyright Alli

Submitted by
The Illegal Subset of the Integers
The Illegal Subset of the Integers writes: "Not satisfied with the current strength of copyright law, in which children and grandmothers who have never used computers can be forced to face expensive lawsuits to prove their innocence, the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, Disney and others have banded together to form the Copyright Alliance. This new lobbying group's members have previously argued for strengthening legal protections for DRM, lowering the standards of proof required for successful infringement claims, and increasing penalties for copyright infringement, while wishing to limit defenses against infringement like copyright misuse and fair use. Reactions fall along predictable lines with Rep. Berman (D-CA), who cites Jack Valenti as his inspiration, praising the new group's creation as "a tremendous idea" while the EFF, CEA & co. are launching the Digital Freedom Campaign to support reforms like Rep. Boucher's (D-VA) Fair Use Act, that would repeal or weaken parts of the DMCA."
Security

Submission + - Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities in Q1 2007

Submitted by Alejandro
Alejandro writes: The Application Security Trends Report identified 1,561 unique vulnerabilities during the first quarter of 2007. Of the reported vulnerabilities, file inclusion, SQL injection, cross-site scripting and directory traversal were the most prevalent, totaling 63 percent. While this report highlights the Top 10 vulnerabilities in commercial and open source applications, the problem is much worse if you factor in proprietary home grown applications, as these typically contain a large number of vulnerabilities.
Power

Submission + - President Bush Gives Self Dictatorial Powers

Submitted by MSTCrow5429
MSTCrow5429 writes: WorldNetDaily (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55 825) reports on National Security Presidential Directive NSPD-51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20, issued by President Bush, which effectively would give the Presidency dictatorial powers during a declared national emergency, without any Congressional or other oversight, over all levels of government throughout the United States and its territories, as well as over the entire private sector. It apparently is meant to override the National Emergencies Act, which gives Congress the power to check Presidential power during national emergencies. The office of National Continuity Director has been created, without authorization from Congress. Frances Fragos Townsend, the assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, would be appointed as the National Continuity Director during a national emergency. Perhaps most worryingly, the President can now unilaterally declare a national emergency, and proceed to implement directives, answerable to no one, not even Congress.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's ODF Add-in Found Lacking

Submitted by
Send Bug Reports Here
Send Bug Reports Here writes: "In all the fuss over open standards, with Microsoft touting its OOXML in favor of the ISO standard ODF, Microsoft eventually changed its tune to say that there's room in the market for both formats and created an add-in to import ODF files into Word. But just how "committed to interoperability" were they? Of the 12 major features that comprise what most people think of as standard Windows and Office integration, Microsoft's extension supports zero of them. You can't double click ODFs to open them, you can't select ODF via the "save as" dialog, and you have to save new documents as something else before you can convert them to an ODF. In fact, when you open an ODF, it automatically converts it to an OOXML DOCX file, and you have to use the ODF menu (not any of the save menus) to convert it back when you're done. Apparently, some see compatibility as a one-way street."
Sony

Submission + - Sony blames poor PS3 sales on Internet

Submitted by i_like_spam
i_like_spam writes: During a recent interview with GamePro, Sony's PR head, Dave Karraker, responded candidly to questions about the negative consumer perceptions of the PS3. He responded, 'I think a lot of this goes back to the proliferation of the Internet, where a very vocal minority can make a lot of noise and potentially alter perceptions of the masses, whether they are accurate or not.'

He also replied: 'A lot of the perceptions are not justified and seem fueled by people who don't have all the facts or have some kind of axe to grind. It is funny how myopic people can be when a new system comes along.'

There you have it, Sony's biggest quarterly loss in four years is due to inept consumers and FUD.
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox heading for mobile phones: Mozilla CEO

Submitted by
Gita68
Gita68 writes: "Mozilla's CEO, Mitchell Baker says her team is working on bringing Firefox to mobile phones and other devices. She also talked to APC Magazine about how Firefox 3.0 will be able to run AJAX apps offline without a web connection, how Firefox now makes a rather staggering $US55million a year and how Mozilla plans to take on Flash and Silverlight in web-based graphics and video. Mozilla Japan's cartoon character: "Foxkeh" pops up to say hello too."
Portables

Submission + - Best Linux Laptop

Submitted by
kcbanner
kcbanner writes: "I have been waiting to purchase my next laptop for quite some time now and have been wondering: What is the best brand/model of laptop to run Linux? This would mean all the devices are supported by the stock Linux kernel, without any ugly binary blobs needed. I am also a game developer, so it would need to have a fairly recent nVidia graphics card with generous amounts of RAM. It doesn't have to have Linux preinstalled (in fact I would prefer that it didn't). So whats the best laptop for Linux?"
Security

How Apple Orchestrated Attack On Researchers 389

Posted by kdawson from the no-way-to-win-friends dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to George Ou's blog on ZDNet for a tale of how Apple's PR director reportedly orchestrated a smear campaign against security researchers David Maynor and Jon Ellch last summer. Ou has been sitting on this story ever since and is only now at liberty to tell it. He posits that the Month of Apple Bugs was a direct result of Apple's bad behavior in the Maynor-Ellch affair. From the blog: "Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X but came a month later and patched their Wireless Drivers (presumably for vulnerabilities that didn't actually exist). Apple patched these 'non-existent vulnerabilities' but then refused to give any credit to David Maynor and Jon Ellch. Since Apple was going to take research, not give proper attribution, and smear security researchers, the security research community responded to Apple's behavior with the MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs) and released a flood of zero-day exploits without giving Apple any notification. The end result is that Apple was forced to patch 62 vulnerabilities in just the first three months of 2007 including last week's megapatch of 45 vulnerabilities."
Microsoft

'Gates for President' Group Gives Up 274

Posted by samzenpus from the know-when-to-fold-them dept.
netbuzz writes "Dilbert creator Scott Adams had done his best to make this fantasy (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) a viable notion, but after three months of trying the group's leader has acknowledged that it's unlikely Gates will give up his current gig. They've tossed in the towel." Here is our original coverage of this ill-conceived plan.
Robotics

Submission + - Toy Robots vs. Killer Robots

Submitted by
Egadfly
Egadfly writes: "Ok, so I play with toy robots. That's my thing. There is an old saying "If you know where I'm coming from, you know what I mean."
But now a Mideast military firm, Elbit Systems, has unveiled a killer robot, the VIPeR, that can roll through "dark alleys, caves and tunnels" armed to the teeth. Suddenly it's not so funny anymore."
Robotics

Submission + - Fridge Tosses Beer to Thirsty Engineer

Submitted by
bstory
bstory writes: "Need a beer, but the couch is too far from the fridge? One clever engineer has solved that problem. He's created a remote control operated fridge that has a ten beer magazine. With the push of a button it will load a cold beer from its magazine into a throwing device. Then another button push hurls the beer up to 20' to your waiting hands. Now if we can just make the microwave work with the fridge to toss us nuked food we'd never have to leave the couch."

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