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Some would consider not running Office 2007 to be a feature.

Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the "surprisingly readable" legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.

ianare sends us to Ars Technica for news of the Ubuntu Xorg BulletProof-X feature, coming soon to a 7.10 (Gutsy) build near you. "It provides a failsafe mode that will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line. If Xorg fails to start,the failsafe mode will initiate with minimalistic settings, low resolution, and a limited number of colors. The failsafe mode also automatically runs Ubuntu's new GTK-based display configuration utility so that users can easily test various display settings and choose a configuration that will work properly with their hardware."

Platonic writes "According to the New York Times, the Emoticon has become much more than something the kids do after school. The little guys seem to have found their way into the workforce: being used by stock brokers and even the U.S. Military. From TFA: 'I mean, it's ludicrous," said Ms. Feldman, 25. "I'm not going to feel better about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because someone puts a frown face to regretfully inform me.'"

BoboB-69 writes "Daring Fireball has posted a humorous, and accurate PR-speak to Plain English translation of Macrovision's CEO's response to Steve Jobs' Open Letter on DRM. Highly recommended reading for slashdotters everywhere."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has front page coverage of the looming daylight savings changeover, and the bugs that may crop up this year. With the extension of daylight savings time by four weeks, some engineers and programmers are warning that unprepared companies will experience serious problems in March. While companies like Microsoft have already patched their software, Gartner is warning that bugs in the travel and banking sectors could have unforeseen consequences in the coming months. ' In addition, trading applications might execute purchases and sales at the wrong time, and cell phone-billing software could charge peak rates at off-peak hours. On top of that, the effect is expected to be felt around the world: Canada and Bermuda are conforming to the U.S.-mandated change, and time zone shifts have happened in other locales as well.'" Is this just more Y2K doomsaying, or do you think there's a serious problem here?

VE3OGG writes "While it would seem that both sides of the American political spectrum are in favour of the national ID card in America, the same cannot be said for Britain. Apparently, the sticking issue across the pond is wasted money: "As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID card project immediately on our being elected to government." Why is there such uniformity in the states, but disunity amongst the Brits?"

nithinraju writes "As declared earlier,Microsoft released their new operating system Windows "Vista" at midnight on Jan. 29. Everybody believes that with vista`s release, XP will lose its popularity. But latest news says that "Microsoft extended xp support to 2014".so xp users have to enjoy! With this extended support, XP will get a total support of 12 years. This is a record for Microsoft ,for offering largest support period for an Operating System. But the bad news is that their latest version "vista" will get support for only 10 years. ie XP regained its strength. Microsoft gave no reason for the support changes to Windows XP."

galacticosfan writes "Management a necessity...?? Windows management with WMI

As the term suggests, management is a key issue considering every aspect of life, be it an Enterprise, a nation, your self or even a computer.In the world of computer science and business, management is an irksome task involving wide range of parameters to monitor, manage and optimize.

Need of Monitoring and Management

1.Large and complex networks: Over the last few years computer networks have grown larger and larger. The necessity to manage such complex networks in turn is increased.

2.Managing Logs: Monitoring events and managing the same is a very crucial job in any enterprise since millions of transactions occur and its very important to know the intricacy of each transaction.

3.Health monitoring: Real time health monitoring of log entries, registry settings and other real time operating system changes.

Network administrators all over the globe face problems which may hamper the effective running of an enterprise.

All the above can be achieved using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) which makes managing Windows based machines/Servers more convenient than the past.A very easy way of managing machines locally as well as remotely just by firing a simple query which can be done using glue languages like VBScript, JScript , C#,ActivePerl etc

To know more http://slashdot.org/~galacticosfan/journal/"

linumax writes "Officelabs is a new internal start-up that is attempting to use some of the methodologies of open-source software development to invigorate the company and generate excitement about new Microsoft products. Specifically, the people behind officelabs want to adopt the release early, release often approach that has worked well for open-source projects such as Linux and Firefox. The move echoes the announcements of Office Live and Windows Live, which both attempt to release lots of software on the web as often as possible."

lisah writes "LinuxChix Brazil's Sulamita Garcia tells Linux.com that, despite an enjoyable four-year run as head of the chapter, it's time to move on and let someone else take over the reins. Involved in the Linux community since 1999, Garcia has been an avid supporter of women in the open source community but says there isn't necessarily as wide a gender gap as many would believe. '[A]fter working with LinuxChix and getting in touch with so many more women that I ever thought would exist in FOSS communities, I strongly believe there are a lot more than we think,' she says. 'They just tend to be a lot less vocal than men.'"

amcdiarmid writes "What happened to HDTV tuners?

For years, we have been told to purchase HDTV capable TV sets. "sure, all you need to do is purchase a HDTV tuner & plug it in..." However, can you find a HDTV tuner device? In almost every case, it is easier to find a HDTV tuner-PCI card for a computer — than it is to find a HDTV tuner box for a TV. (I think the cost of building a quiet computer for this is excessive.)

As an example: If you go to Crutchfield.com and type in HDTV tuners, you will find the tag line of: Add one of these Hight Def tuners to your HD-ready TV to enjoy free over-the-air HDTV broadcasts. However, if you go into the link — you find two DirectTV units, and a $2000 Sony Media Center 2005 PC.

I really just want to watch sports, and Law and order on the air... I can find a few units at $180 for ATSC, and a bunch that require DirectTV... but what happened to the promised HDTV tuners???"

geekmansworld writes "Our business is entirely dependent on e-mail to function. We have our own server and maintain it scrupulously to make sure we optimize legitimate receipt versus deletion of spam. All our major clients' domain names are SA whitelisted to avoid blocking. Increasingly, we've had trouble receiving messages sent through certain ISPs. We've poured over the mail logs, but the messages never even got to our servers (we have primary and secondary MX). It's no secret that spam is overwhelming these days. I wonder, is e-mail now so unreliable that it's a dead medium of communication? How are other server admins coping with email recently?"

An anonymous reader writes "PC World Senior Editor Tom Spring signed up for 32 online accounts. Then tried to cancel all of them. The most difficult to cancel: NetZero. The easiest to cancel: Consumer Reports Online and The New York Times TimesSelect. His experience was rated on a number of criteria, and highlights the hoops that commercial enterprises put in place to keep their 'customers'. From the article: 'I had a hard time canceling my $5 monthly Gold Classmates.com account, too. I couldn't find any information on how to cancel until I entered the word cancel In the site's search engine. Classmates.com spokesperson John Uppendahl confirmed that there is no other way to find cancellation information. But that was only the first hoop I had to jump through to cancel my membership. Classmates.com also forced me to click through several Web pages reminding me of the benefits I'd lose. Finally my clicking ended at a generic Member Support e-mail contact page containing a blank 'Your Question' field. Though the form said nothing about cancellations, I used it to request that the service cancel my subscription. The next day I received an e-mail message confirming that the service had accepted my request.'"

frdmfghtr writes "The October 30 issue of Forbes Magazine has an article speculating that Richard Stallman's efforts to rewrite the GPL could threaten to 'tear it apart.' The article describes how the GPLv3 is expected to be incompatible with the GPLv2, causing trouble for Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat. The article wraps it up: 'And a big loser, eventually, could be Stallman himself. If he relents now, he likely would be branded a sellout by his hard-core followers, who might abandon him. If he stands his ground, customers and tech firms may suffer for a few years but ultimately could find a way to work around him. Either way, Stallman risks becoming irrelevant, a strange footnote in the history of computing: a radical hacker who went on a kamikaze mission against his own program and went down in flames, albeit after causing great turmoil for the people around him.'"