liam193 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Shouldn't copyrights last forever?

Submitted by proxima on Saturday May 19, 2007 @07:34PM

proxima writes: Mark Helprin, author and fellow at the Claremont Institute, writes an op-ed piece in today's New York Times. He responds to the argument about expiration being for the public good by saying, "it might also be for the public good were Congress to allow the enslavement of foreign captives and their descendants (this was tried);" He argues that Congress should extend the length of copyright again, "as far as it can throw". This is certainly a striking position compared to many on Slashdot and fellow guest columnist Lawrence Lessig (access to archives required).

Submission + - Linux Training

Submitted by Spritzer on Saturday May 19, 2007 @12:51PM

Spritzer writes: I work for a rather large corporation with multiple divisions around the world. Nearly all user computers in the company are Windows systems, and there is no plan to move to Linux in the future. However, a good many of our products are now designed to run on Linux systems for security and stability purposes. Obviously, the design/development teams are knowledgeable in the use of Linux operating systems.Unfortunately my field service teams are not, and their is no in-house training program. This has begun to affect our ability to provide efficient, quality service to customers when in the field.

What training services have you used in the past to get people trained in the basics of using? I'd prefer to stay away from online, self-paced courses and get my people some hands on training with an instructor.

Submission + - Yahoo's uptime earns that exclamation point!

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Friday May 18, 2007 @02:16PM

netbuzz writes: "The Yahoo Search site may have been down for a spell this morning, but the company's main site — Yahoo.com — is on quite a roll of uninterrupted uptime: 266 days to be precise. That makes Yahoo the reigning uptime champ among the Internet's 20 most trampled Web sites, according to Pingdom. Google does great, too, but those additions to the Google family — YouTube and Blogger — have had little to brag about in this regard.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1530 2"

Submission + - AMD Barcelona Slipping Again?!?

Submitted by StarViking on Friday May 18, 2007 @01:41PM

StarViking writes: According to this X-bit Labs Story, AMD's bloated (283 square mm!), server chip looks like it will be shifting again, from "Early Q2" to "Mid-2007" to now finally "Late Q3" (August/September is best guess). If Intel is able to pull forward its Penryn line, this might mean that Barcelona won't even get a full month "in the sun" before Intel pulls ahead again...

Submission + - MS defines Linux security ..

Submitted by

rs232

on Friday May 18, 2007 @01:19PM

rs232 writes: "'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'

"One of these is the fact that Linux has less of a surface area, which led customers to believe that Linux is inherently more secure"

"We also have server core, which doesn't have the GUI [graphical user interface], so I would say that is a response to the options people had with Linux that they didn't have with Windows"

"the thrust behind IIS 7 was to respond to Linux and I think we have had an effect if you look at the data on Internet-facing Web server numbers"

"I am not particularly worried about Red Hat, which makes a product — or rather gets free development groups to make a product — that they sell for about the same amount of money as Windows Server"

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2132581,00.as p"

Submission + - Aluminum Pellets As Alternative Fuel

Submitted by

s31523

on Friday May 18, 2007 @01:00PM

s31523 writes: "As gas prices in the US creep towards $4.00 a gallon, there is more focus on alternative fuels. Researchers at Purdue University have created a system that generates hydrogen "on demand" using pellets made from pure aluminum and gallium. The gallium prevents a "skin" from forming and allows the aluminum to react with oxygen to form hydrogen and aluminum oxide. Although this reaction leaves behind aluminum oxide, which can be recycled, it solves the problem of stabilizing hydrogen. According to Purdue, this new method combines two methods of creating hydrogen, both of which have flaws that make them impractical, but combining the two seems to solve many of the problems."

Submission + - $16,000 Bounty for Sendmail, Apache 0Day Flaws

Submitted by Famestay on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:52PM

Famestay writes: Verisign's iDefense is putting up a $16,000 prize for any hacker who can find a remotely exploitable vulnerability in six critical Internet infrastructure applications. The bounty is for a zero-day code execution hole on the following Internet infrastructure technologies: Apache httpd, Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) daemon, Sendmail SMTP daemon, OpenSSH sshd, Microsoft Internet Information (IIS) Server and Microsoft Exchange Server.

Submission + - Only Windows Server, Not Client, to be 64bit-Only

Submitted by brunascle on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:13PM

brunascle writes: A post to the Windows Vista blog has stated that Bill Laing's comments about the end of 32-bit versions of Windows only applied to Windows Server, not Client. According to Alex Heaton, "we have not decided when Windows Client will follow Windows Server and become 64-bit only." This clears up previous discussions, including one here on Slashdot, that assumed the comments applied to both Server and Client.

Submission + - Symantec Anti-Virus software damages system files

Submitted by fleung on Friday May 18, 2007 @12:13PM

fleung writes: This morning (18 May 2007, Asia Pacific time), Symantec's worldwide customers fount their computer failed to reboot, while the helpdesk was plunged into a hot pot. The rough root course is that Norton released wrong virus code definition by identifing a few system files(.exe and .dll) as virus and removing them. This will cause system reboot failure. I tried on my Traditional Chinese XP SP2, no problem was found. Till now, only Simplified Chinese version Windows XP SP2 system is reported to be impacted. Two system files under C:\windows\system32: netapp32.dll, and lsass.exe are identified wrongly as virus. The solution is to copy the correct version of the above two files into windows\system32 and reboot the machine, stop the Norton.

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.

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