public transport - Slashdot User

HP's Windows Bundle Trouble 697

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 15, 2006 @08:21PM from the i'm-sorry-please-enter-your-option-again dept.

narramissic writes "A French consumer group has filed 3 lawsuits against HP, saying the company's practice of selling consumer PCs with Windows pre-installed violates a French law that 'prohibits linking the functionality of a product to another product' — not to mention that consumers wind up paying for an unwanted OS. For its part, HP contends that it is not in violation of the law because the OS is integral to the PC. 'The PC without an OS is not a product because it doesn't work,' said Alain Spitzmuller, legal affairs director for HP France. 'We believe the market is for products that work.'"

Comment Re:Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score 1) 177

by public transport on Sunday November 19, 2006 @08:21AM (#16903364) Attached to: Patches For Pine Going Away

mutt is more powerful than Pine, vastly more so for those of use who learn to configure it. It's my primary mailer, Thunderbird my sencondary. But,

Pine is user friendly. It's doesn't have a GUI, but still has a menu system that makes it almost as user friendly as a GUI mailer. To many people I know, it is invaluable. It's what works without learning a bunch of keystrokes, whether you need to log in from a foreign remote Windows machine (no X, don't want to set up IMAP) to read mail, or if you just want a lightweight mailer.

I'll be looking for a replacement, possibly Alpine, as suggested in this thread, when it goes beta, whereas I'll reserve the mutt recommendation to power-users.

London 2006, Meet London 1984 422

Posted by Zonk on Sunday May 14, 2006 @05:31AM from the what-is-the-newspeak-for-change-the-channel dept.

Draape writes "Shoreditch TV is an experiment TV channel beaming live footage from the street into people's homes. According to the Telegraph U.K. television will broadcast from 400 surveillance cameras on the streets, into people's homes. For now they are only showing it to 22,000 homes, but next year they plan on going national with the 'show'. They fly under the flag 'fighting crime from the sofa'."

Lucent Sues Microsoft, Wants All 360s Recalled 475

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday April 07, 2006 @12:01AM from the we-did-it-first dept.

robyannetta writes "Lucent has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, demanding that they pull all Xbox 360s from the market. Lucent claims that Microsoft has violated their MPEG2 patents which they claim they patented in 1993." While it's unlikely console will be pulled from shelves, it's one way to generate some publicity.

Open Source For Perimeter Security 56

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 03, 2006 @01:43PM from the people-still-afraid-of-oss dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IT Observer has a look at some of the perceived problems with an OpenSource approach to security and what could be done to improve the situation. From the article: 'There is a widespread and wholly inaccurate impression that open source development is somehow haphazard and undisciplined, a free-for-all among brilliant but uncoordinated individuals. In fact, most major open source projects are very tightly managed highly disciplined teams. This article gives examples of very successful Open Source security projects -- netfilter and Snort -- and also describes some weaknesses that need to be addressed by IT organizations or vendors.'"

Super-Strong Synthetic Muscles Developed 191

Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 19, 2006 @05:34AM from the we-have-the-technology-we-can-rebuild-him dept.

Too Hot! wrote to mention a BBC article about extremely powerful synthetic muscles. From the article: "The most powerful type, 'shorted fuel cell muscles' convert chemical energy into heat, causing a special shape-memory metal alloy to contract. Turning down the heat allows the muscle to relax. Lab tests showed that these devices had a lifting strength more than 100 times that of normal skeletal muscle. Another kind of muscle being developed by the team converted chemical energy into electrical energy which caused a material made from carbon nanotube electrodes to bend."

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