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Portables

Netbooks Popular Enough For a C&D From Psion 234

Posted by timothy from the real-mark-of-success dept.
Kevin C. Tofel writes "After watching the netbook industry explode from nothing to 14 million sales in year, the time is right for Cease & Desist letters. Psion, a UK computer company that years ago sold a small sub-notebook called a netBook, is starting to protect the term. At least one netbook enthusiast site received a C&D for using the 'netbook' term and others are sure to follow. The site was given three months to stop using the term. Ironically, it isn't the enthusiast sites that coined the popular term. In the spring of 2008, Intel dubbed these devices netbooks to help define a market for their low-powered Intel Atom CPU."

Comment UK vs. Poland (Score 1) 279

by muszek (#25898081) Attached to: The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast

I spend considerable amounts of time in both countries.

In Poland I pretty much get the advertized speeds, maybe it's slightly slower in peek hours. Currently I'm connected via cable - 6 Mbps and yesterday's episode of House is coming home almost that fast.

I've lived in two different houses in UK over the past 1.5 years and used the web at friend's house numerous times. Every house had DSL connection (speeds between 6 and 10 Mbps) from different providers. It's decent during the day (I'd say ~3 Mbps), but once everyone comes back home from school/work (~5p.m.) speeds drop to below 512 kbps (web, anything out of the standard ports range drops to a crawl).
Cellphones

(Useful) Stupid BlackBerry Tricks? 238

Posted by kdawson from the maze-of-twisty-stupid-tricks dept.
Wolfger writes "Continuing the recent (useful) stupid theme: I've recently become a BlackBerry user, and I'm in love with the obvious(?) tricks, such as installing MidpSSH to access my home box remotely. But I'd like to know what more experienced Crackberry addicts can share."
Patents

Ballmer Suggests Linux Distros Will Soon Have to Pay Up 520

Posted by Zonk from the oh-good-more-smack-talk dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Via Groklaw comes comments from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer at a UK event, in which the company once again threatens Linux distributions that haven't signed up with their program. '"People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week ... Ballmer praised Novell at the UK event for valuing intellectual property, and suggested that open source vendors will be forced to strike similar deals with other patent holders. He predicted that firms like Eolas will soon come after open source vendors or users. Microsoft paid $521m to settle a patent claim by Eolas in August.'"
Windows

Windows Genuine Advantage Servers Out 300

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-disadvantage dept.
krewemaynard writes to let us know that Microsoft has been having major problems with its WGA servers since at least Friday evening. Quoting Ars: "Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service... The Microsoft WGA Forums are full of problem reports, and Microsoft WGA Program Manager Phil Liu has acknowledged that there is a problem, and that MS is investigating." Update: 07/25 22:10 GMT by KD :Microsoft has identified and fixed the problem and posted instructions for anyone whose system mistakenly failed a WGA check. (The link posted earlier was to a 2006 article.)
Programming

Submission + - Geany - A Perfect Programming IDE

Submitted by
muszek
muszek writes: "Complain as much as you want about software availability under Linux, but when it comes to programming tool, we don't have to feel inferior. Over the past one and a half decades, geeks created many editors... for other geeks. But what about casual programmers? Those that want a simple and lightweight IDE? Ubuntu News has a review of Geany — a quite new, but really well designed editor that has all of the essential features and manages to be easy to pick up. What programming IDE(s) do you use under Linux? What makes it better than other tools?"
Windows

Vista Can Run Without Activation for a Year 357

Posted by CowboyNeal from the procrastinists-in-luck dept.
An anonymous reader gave us a heads up on this article for people who like putting things off. It begins: "Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end-run around one of Microsoft's key anti-piracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today. Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista's registry lets users put off the operating system's product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely."
Linux Business

Novell Assents To "Windows Is Cheaper Than Linux" 351

Posted by kdawson from the whose-side-you-on-anyway dept.
dyous87 points out a ZDNet article reporting that Novell has endorsed a customer's comment claiming that the total cost of ownership of Linux is higher then that of Windows. Novell and Microsoft jointly issued a press release quoting an IT guy for a UK-based bank, HSBC: "Some will be surprised to learn that our Windows environment has a lower total cost of ownership than our current Linux environment." The context of the comment makes it clear that HSBC's Linux environment has a mix of distros, and that a move to centralize around one distro — Novell's — will save money. Nevertheless, Novell's connection to this assertion is not likely to improve their reputation in the open source community.
Security

File Sharing — Harmful to Children and a Threat to National Security 342

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the root-of-all-evil dept.
jkrobin writes to mention that a recent report from the US Patent office calls peer-to-peer file sharing harmful to children and a threat to national security. "Interestingly, the report makes numerous references to RIAA and MPAA legal actions against file actions, as well as cites a 2005 Department of Homeland Security report that government workers had installed file-sharing programs that accessed classified information without their knowledge."
Linux Business

Why Dell Won't Offer Linux On Its PCs 628

Posted by kdawson from the D-I-Y dept.
derrida sends us to an article in the Guardian by Jack Schofield explaining why he believes Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves. Quoting: "The most obvious [problem] is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system... so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naive users who don't RTFM... and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying 'Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support' isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?"
Windows

Vista Activation Cracked by Brute Force 470

Posted by Zonk from the disturbance-in-the-force dept.
Bengt writes "The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack. It's nothing fancy; it's described as a 'glorified guesser.' The danger of this approach is that sooner or later the key cracker will begin activating legitimate keys purchased by other consumers. From the article: 'The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'"
Microsoft

Ballmer Repeats Threats Against Linux 470

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-can-only-end-badly dept.
daria42 writes "Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world.""

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