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PoliTech notes in a journal entry that "Vista is the gift that just keeps on giving." "Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and [CEO] Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. 'As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,' he said... 'The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,' he said. 'Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year.' Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology... That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment.'"

Damian Francis writes "Australian computer expert Vito Cassisi has come up with a list of 20 features that Windows 7 should have. The article includes features like modularized OS, new UAC, program caching, standards compliant browser and a whole lot more with explanations as to why these features should be included. With Windows Vista only receiving a luke-warm reception, Microsoft needs to make sure Windows 7 is a winner from the get go." What other features would you suggest to Microsoft if they are to have a hope for recovery?

Well, given how badly misreported this law has been, I'm not surprised that you misunderstood it.

All this law does is provide legal protection for teachers to tech "alternate views" to the Theory of Evolution. It is NOT exclusively restricted to ID teaching. This could, logically, also include FSM theory. So don't worry, be Happy! Teachers in LA can now ALSO tell children about the Noodly beginnings of humanity in addition to other creationist teachings.

Seriously, this really is much ado about nothing. It's just an anti-stupid lawsuit law, to protect teachers who simply ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that not everyone believes ToE is correct. That's it, nothing more, no matter what the militant Atheist sites and D-Kos may say.

You make fun of Christianity's aversion to homosexuality, but the fact of the matter is that the harsh restrictions on the lifestyles of Christians make the taboos such as homosexuality and miscegenation all the more attractive. Such extremes such as celibacy have forced even priests into the arms of pederasty.

Christianity and religion as a whole encourages the polarization of actions into "good" and "evil" and by forcing the pendulum to the "good" side makes the "evil" side more attractive than an a-moral philosophy can do.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/firefox_data_snoop/

Firefox - your friendly data snooper

The Phorm bug is spreading. The idea of collecting a user's browsing history and flogging that data doesn't just appeal to ISPs. The Mozilla Foundation, the people behind the Firefox browser, want some of that action too.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/firefox_data_snoop/

Certainly theists trying to ascribe some form of theism to Einstein are mistaken. However, the atheists can be just as bad. I have already seen in Internet forums that atheists are using this newly found statement of Einstein to boost their cause, arguing along the lines of "Einstein was a genius, and he didn't believe in God, so clearly rejecting the existence of God is the smart thing to do." Einstein, though a brilliant physicist, was not trained in the philosophy of religion. It's a pity that when atheists could refer to eminent philosophers of religion like Mackie in his The Miracle of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1983) or (pre-conversion) Flew as examples of how to argue well against theism, they instead use completely inappropriate figures like Einstein.

A number of readers are sending word that the blogosphere and Twittersphere are alight with reports of Microsoft's new block on messages containing YouTube URLs. Both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger reportedly implement the block. One blogger sniffed the network to discover that such messages receive a NAK from Microsoft's servers. Microsoft has been blocking messages by keyword, as an anti-phishing measure, for some time, but *.youtube.com would not seem to provoke much worry about phishing. Instead, as B.E.T.A Daily speculates, "This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on Messenger." Hard to get away with in an arena where you don't enjoy a monopoly.

Jacob's ladder writes "Ten years ago this week, the Free Software Summit arguably marked the beginning of today's OSS movement. Ars Technica interviews many of those in attendance when the revolution began. John Ousterhout, creator of the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit and founder of Electric Cloud was there, and notes how much the landscape has changed. 'When I made my first open-source release in the early 1980s (VLSI chip design tools from Berkeley), there were probably less than five open-source projects in the world. By the time of the first O'Reilly conference, there were dozens; now there are probably thousands. Also, open-source software has received substantial mainstream acceptance. 10 years ago, people were suspicious or afraid of it; now it is widely embraced.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Russinovich, in his latest blog post, overviews the significant work that went into enhancing the file copy performance of Windows Vista SP1, including the team undoing some of the changes that had originally been made for Windows Vista RTM."
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new report by Digital Music News, 36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed. Given their claim that filling an iPod legally would cost about $40,000, they're pretty sure that most of those computers are infringing upon at least a few imaginary property rights. BitTorrent shouldn't feel left out, though. BitTorrent actually uses more bandwidth, but the article suggests that this is because it is used to share larger files, like movies."

An anonymous reader sends us to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for a developing situation. Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, made a post earlier today revealing that Apple was offering him some money (in the wake of the ThinkSecret shutdown) to close down his blog. He said he was interested in taking it. A few hours later, Lyons posted again revealing that Apple's lawyers had contacted him angrily, saying the details of the deal were supposed to remain private. Fake Steve replied 'we either deal out in the open, completely transparently, or we don't deal.' A third post gives details of Apple's lawyers' next response, going totally medieval on him. Since then the situation has calmed down a bit.

An anonymous reader writes "Recent articles in the New York Times and at CNET have highlighted the growing concern that Google holds significant power and influence over Firefox's development. In an interview published today, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver did his best to proclaim Mozilla's independence. Yes, Google pays Mozilla $56 million per year, Google is the default search engine, and supplier of many of the browser's features (anti-phishing, anti-malware, incorrect URL resolution). Shaver insists that in spite of these ties, Mozilla still calls the shots over Firefox's development."

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot down Google's new mobile platform at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and said the mobile platform market is 'Microsoft's world.' Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. 'Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],' Ballmer said. 'Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world,' he added."