liam193 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Microsoft to buy Aquantive for $6 billion

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: In a bid to boost its presence in advertising, Microsoft said Friday that it will pay $6 billion to acquire Aquantive, a digital marketing and services company.

The deal is Microsoft's largest ever, highlighting the importance of supporting more-advanced advertising products and technologies across areas including media planning, video on demand and Internet Protocol television. Aquantive produces the Atlas Media Console and Drive PM tools for advertisers and publishers, and owns interactive ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish.

http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+buy+Aquantive+for +6+billion/2100-1030_3-6184778.html?tag=nefd.lede

Submission + - Competition from Linux Reshapes Windows Server '08

Submitted by yuna49 on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:00PM

yuna49 writes: eWeek reports that "some of the changes in the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008 are a response to features and performance advantages that have made Linux an attractive option to Microsoft customers." The article cites Linux's smaller "surface area," which appears to mean having fewer exposed services and open ports. In addition, it appears that Windows Server 2008 will run without a GUI, as do many Linux servers now. Other areas where Microsoft is playing catch-up include clustering and web-serving.

However Linux, with Xen, appears to be less of a threat in the virtualization arena. According to the general manager of Windows server division, "We can tell which hypervisor they are running on and to be honest, I see zero on Linux. We see VMware rather than Xen because it's not really out there in production versions of Red Hat and SUSE. But the long-term issue around virtualization will be who had the best management tools."

Vista's 40 Million License Sales In Context 225

Posted by Zonk on Friday May 18, 2007 @11:41AM from the a-bit-of-background dept.

Overly Critical Guy writes "Microsoft's figure of 40 million Vista OEM licenses sold has less impact when weighed against the expanded size of the PC market, according to IDC numbers. The myriad of factors involved in determining success in the market makes Microsoft's constant comparisons to Windows XP less reliable as a growth indicator — particularly with Microsoft refusing to reveal the number of actual activated Vista licenses. 'HP reported year-over-year PC sales growth of about 24 percent, or about twice worldwide PC sales growth. Whatever HP is doing right, it's more than just Vista ... If Microsoft wasn't so hung up on XP comparisons as the benchmark, it could really demonstrate that Vista sales are increasing. The first 20 million figure really represented four months of sales, and that could have been positive data because Microsoft protected its customers' holiday investments. For free! Instead of making that point, Microsoft got carried away with making comparisons back to XP.'"

Submission + - What's the Matter with HDMI?

Submitted by mrnomas on Friday May 18, 2007 @11:22AM

mrnomas writes: "HDMI, as we've pointed out elsewhere, is a format which was designed primarily to serve the interests of the content-provider industries, not to serve the interests of the consumer. The result is a mess, and in particular, the signal is quite hard to route and switch, cable assemblies are unnecessarily complicated, and distance runs are chancy. Why is this, and what did the designers of the standard do wrong? And what can we do about it? The story begins with another badly-developed standard, DVI.

Submission + - iBurst Wireless Broadband makes it to the USA.

Submitted by

zophyx

on Friday May 18, 2007 @11:06AM

zophyx writes: "Redwood Wireless Brings Kyocera's iBurst Technology to Sioux Falls, Marking the Broadband Technology's United States Debut.
The company touts that its service is 10 times faster than Internet service available on wireless provider networks
such as Verizon and Sprint. It's also faster than DSL and cable Internet service, representative Doolittle said."

Submission + - Who's Sending The Most Tech Jobs Overseas?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18, 2007 @11:00AM

An anonymous reader writes: InformationWeek has obtained a a non-public government list of the 200 companies who received the most H-1B visa last year to hire foreign workers. Despite protestations from Bill Gates and NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman that there aren't enough qualified Americans, the 65,000 H-1B visa granted yearly depress IT salaries in the U.S. As the story points out, last year, 9 Indian firms collectively were issued 19,512 of the 65,000 H-1B visas granted. Who's on the list? Unisys is number one, with 4,908 visas. The Indian outsourcer WiPro is second. Microsoft is number three on the list, IBM number eight, and Oracle USA number nine. The New York City Public School system ranks twenty-second on the list, with 642 H-1B visas received last year.

Submission + - Is it bad design to have too many user roles?

Submitted by

Wanna Dogood

on Friday May 18, 2007 @10:59AM

Wanna Dogood writes: "Hello,

When I was a kid, I worked in a small store which had one cash register with 52 departments on it. The clerks could never figure out what department to sell the ball point pen under, the clients always came away figuring the clerks were dummies and the assistant manager became a bitter, frustrated woman trying to balance the daily accounting.

Today I am a grown-up programmer analyst who is now working with a client who is building an application with 56 user roles in it. The test team is inadequate to the task of checking if each user role has access to the functionality it is designed to access and no more.

I've been blessed with the task of writing up a risks document, and would like to justify that putting in too many user roles is simply a known bad software design practice, but I can't find any academic reference for this point.

Does anyone have a good reference for this problem?

Thank you for your time and patience,
WD"

Submission + - Build you own music streamer

Submitted by

bain

on Friday May 18, 2007 @10:58AM

bain writes: "Rob Hardwick has turned his wireless router in to his own bespoke media streamer. The Netgear WGT634U uses OpenWrt and doesn't require a computer to control. The $180 (£90) project might be a lot more difficult than going to a shop but at least there's a sense of achievement."

Submission + - Avoiding Business Continuity Planning Pitfalls

Submitted by

tomcat66_g500

on Friday May 18, 2007 @10:57AM

tomcat66_g500 writes: "Increased risks, complexities, and new federal regulations have escalated the urgency to have an effective Business Continuity Program (BCP) that extends beyond the information technology domain. This article shows how to avoid eight common disaster recovery planning and management pitfalls."

Global Internet Censorship On the Rise 185

Posted by Zonk on Friday May 18, 2007 @10:15AM from the shout-if-you-can-hear-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "State-led internet censorship is on the rise around the world. According to a study conducted by the Open Net Initiative and reported by the BBC, some 25 of 41 countries surveyed were filtering at least some content. Skype and Google Maps were two of the most often-censored sites, according to the article. 'The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the report: politics and power, security concerns and social norms. The report said: 'In a growing number of states around the world, internet filtering has huge implications for how connected citizens will be to the events unfolding around them, to their own cultures, and to other cultures and shared knowledge around the world.'"

Submission + - The Power Factor: Why CFLs do not save energy

Submitted by

Rob Alter

on Friday May 18, 2007 @10:11AM

Rob Alter writes: "Power factor is still very important ... while you only pay for the actual energy used (as shown on the packaging), power companies have to provide the full voltage and current (also shown on many packages and/or other literature). The relatively poor power factor increases distribution losses and therefore the cost of getting electricity to your house. http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.ht m"

Submission + - Open standard for biometric passwords

Submitted by

A student from the University of Amsterdam:

on Friday May 18, 2007 @09:39AM

A student from the University of Amsterdam: writes: "Students of the University of Amsterdam are doing research to a make a 'weak' password 'strong'. This will be done by analyzing and registering the typing behaviour of individual users and add the gathered information to the password. The students comment: "Our goal is to create an open standard for stronger passwords by adding biometric properties of typing behaviour." Because there needs to be a lot data to analyze biometric properties of typing behaviour, they created a test at http://keystroke.projects.os3.nl. After doing this test there will be a description of the typing behaviour in comparison with the typing behaviour of another person. The students hope that there will be a lot of individuals (as well IT as non-IT) that do the test so that they can gather enough data. For more information — http://keystroke.projects.os3.nl."

Submission + - Why is OpenDNS redirecting Google?

Submitted by bradt on Thursday May 17, 2007 @03:39PM

bradt writes: Yesterday, a friend suggested that I check out OpenDNS.com as a way to "speed up" my internet connection... I did a few DNS lookups with dig to see if they were faster than my ISP, and discovered that OpenDNS is redirecting www.google.com to their domain! It seems that this issue has been going on for at least a month, and has been discussed in the OpenDNS Forum and in Google Groups as well.

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