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Microsoft

Has a Decade of .NET Delivered On Microsoft's Promises? 558

Posted by timothy from the full-of-holes dept.
cyclocommuter writes with this snippet from The Register's assessment of whether Microsoft's .NET framework has been a success: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible. ... Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."

Submission + - "Mozilla man sends Firefoxers to Microsoft Bing" (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by aunt edna
aunt edna writes: The Register reports that:
"Mozilla director of community development Asa Dotzler — co-founder of the original Firefox project — has encouraged Firefox users to switch their search engine from Google to Microsoft Bing in the wake of Eric Schmidt's now infamous words on net privacy.In an interview aired by CNBC on Sunday, the Google boss insisted that anyone who worries about Mountain View retaining personal data must be guilty of improper behavior. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," he said.

"If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

In a post to his personal blog Thursday morning, ten-year Mozilla vet Asa Dotzler quoted Schmidt in full before indicating that he's not too happy with the Googler's haughty take on data retention."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft 'Acknowledged Enterprise Role Of Linux (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by eWEEK Europe
eWEEK Europe writes: Three years on from Microsoft's deal with Novell, the real importance is coming through, says Novell's OpenSUSE community manager, Joe Brockmeier.
When Novell and Microsoft signed a deal to support Windows and Linux in the enterprise, it caused a furore. Three years on, the deal shows that Microsoft really does acknowledge the value of Linux in the enterprise — at least that's the view from the OpenSUSE community.
Space

Submission + - 'Space barley' used to make Japanese beer (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by tugfoigel
tugfoigel writes: A Japanese brewery has created a beer using barley grown from seeds which spent five months on board the International Space Station.

At 10,000 yen, or £68, for just six bottles, the limited edition brew tastes no different from standard beer.

Scientists involved in the joint Japanese-Russian project say this bodes well for attempts to grow other edible plants in space.

Submission + - Court says Fair Use May Hold in Some RIAA Cases (blogspot.com)

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston RIAA case in which the defendant, represented by Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School, admitted liability at his trial, the Court has entered judgment in favor of the RIAA for the monetary award of $625,000 fixed by the jury. However, the Court left open the questions of whether the amount is excessive, and whether attorneys fees and/or sanctions should be awarded, and has scheduled further briefing of those issues. The Court granted the RIAA much, but not all, of the injunctive relief it rquested. In an unusual step, the Court issued a 38-page decision (PDF) explaining in some detail the Court's views of the Fair Use defense in the context of cases like this, and indicating that there are some factual scenarios — not applicable in this particular case — in which it might have concluded that the claims were barred by Fair Use. E.g. it declined to rule out the possibility that creation of mp3 files exclusively for space-shifting purposes from audio CDs a defendant had previously purchased might constitute fair use.

Submission + - Ambassador Claims ACTA Secrecy Necessary (keionline.org)

Submitted by
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes: "According to the Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head of US Trade Representatives, the secrecy around the ACTA copyright treaty because without that secrecy, people would be 'walking away from the table.' If you don't remember, that treaty is the one where leaks indicate that it may contain all sorts of provisions for online copyright enforcement, like a global DMCA with takedown and anti-circumvention restrictions, three-strikes laws to terminate offending internet connections, and copyright cops. FOIA requests for the treaty text have been rebuffed over alleged 'national security' concerns. One can only hope that what he has said is true and that sites like Wikileaks will help tear down the veil of secrecy behind which they're negotiating our future."
Apple

Submission + - Copenhagen police turn to Macs (itpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Copenhagen police are managing this week's global climate change summit — with protestors and presidents expected to show up — with a bunch of Mac Minis. When it needed to replace its previous system, the Danish Police Department travelled Europe to see other systems, and decided those Windows based systems weren't good enough, or fast enough. Now, it runs off of Xserves, Minis and Pros. Its call centre has just eight employees each shift to take as many as 1,200 calls from the city of 1.2 million, while cities like Glasgow have dozens of staff. Intriguingly, it didn't cost more — as Mac's usually do. “It was just about the same price, that’s the funny thing,” said police inspector Karsten Højgaard.

Submission + - British geology maps now free to all.

Submitted by
Smivs
Smivs writes: "Now you can find out what's under your feet by using the British Geological Survey's (BGS) new OpenGeoscience portal. It allows the public to study all the UK's rocks on a simple Google map, down to a scale of 1:50,000. Toggling the map shows overlying towns and streets. A range of educational and professional tools are also brought together on the website, including the huge national geological archive of photographs. The BBC report that Tens of thousands of images have been amassed into the BGS library over the decades, showing different rock forms around Britain, fossil types, and the impact on the landscape of natural events such as flooding. The whole archive is now searchable and free to use for non-commercial purposes. Those who live in Edinburgh, for example, can see how their city is built on top of an ancient volcano. Glaswegians on the other hand will notice that their city is built on the remains of an ancient tropical forest, evident in the coal measures and fossil trees that can be seen today."
Google

Submission + - Is it time to regulate Google?

Submitted by pcause
pcause writes: The Official Google Blog announces that Google will now offer "personalized" search results based on your last 180 days of queries EVEN IF YOU AREN"T LOGGED IN . This is just confirmation that Google is tracking you, even when you aren't logged in, and that it keeps at LEAST 6 months of history. We know from the event where AOL released data to search researchers that 6 months of data is enough to identify an individual despite the supposedly anonymous cookie.

Yes you can opt out of the personalization, but does that mean Google isn't still collecting data about you? I doubt it. Google has always invaded your privacy by tracking you, but they are now admitting it. There'd be huge flames here on /. if the government was doing this. Google is no more trustworthy than the government as they do all this to make money and are totally unaccountable.

Is it time to regulate Google?
IBM

Submission + - Big Blue Patenting Big Brother Sales Techniques

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Big Blue meets Big Brother in a newly-published IBM patent application for Assessing Personality and Mood Characteristics of a Customer to Enhance Customer Satisfaction and Improve Chances of a Sales, which is certain to send chills up privacy advocates' spines. When you shop in a store that employs IBM's patent-pending invention, your facial image will be captured to determine your emotional state, your gait will be tracked to assess your personality and mood characteristics, and infrared gaze tracking apparatuses will be used to sense, locate and follow the movement of your eyes to gauge your interest in the item being observed. All of this information — as well as who you're shopping with — will be fed to sales associates together with profile information on you that's retrieved from a database — e.g., name, prior merchandise purchases, past sales approaches that have worked on you.

Submission + - Offset bad code with Bad Code Offsets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profit's are donated to Free Software projects which work eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today.
Printer

Submission + - What do you do when printers cost less than ink? 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A family member recently asked me to pick up more ink for her Epson Photo RX 595. Unfortunately, replacing the black and color ink cartridges costs $81.92 + tax at the local store! That so bad that I got a replacement printer that's just as good and spare ink for less. But now I have a useless piece of e-waste that I can't even give away. What can you do with a printer like that? I hate to just throw it away.

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