Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Microsoft

Microsoft Ready To Talk Windows On ARM 342

Posted by timothy from the hole-in-the-marketshare-dike dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After many months of working in secret, Microsoft is nearly ready to start talking about its plans to bring Windows to ARM-based processors. However, while the company is set to discuss the effort at next month's Consumer Electronics Show, there is still a lot that must be done before such products can hit the market. Among the steps needed is for hardware makers to create ARM-compatible drivers, a time-consuming effort that explains in part why Microsoft is talking about the initiative well ahead of any products being ready. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is already starting to ship on some ARM devices and running on many others."
The Internet

Bank of America Buying Abusive Domain Names 249

Posted by timothy from the get-out-your-thesaurus dept.
Nite_Hawk writes "Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of directors' and senior executives' names followed by 'sucks' and 'blows.'"
GUI

10 Dos and Don'ts To Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier 246

Posted by timothy from the sorry-dave-can't-let-you-do-that dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Tom Limoncelli has a piece in 'Queue' summarizing the Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology's list of how to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. FTA: '#2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line.'"
The Media

BYTE Is Coming Back 185

Posted by timothy from the has-it-been-12-years-already dept.
harrymcc writes "More than a dozen years after its death, BYTE magazine is still the most beloved computer magazine of all time — the one that employees of every other tech mag got used to being compared unfavorably with. And now it's being revived, in the form of a new BYTE.com. The new version isn't replicating the focus of the old BYTE — it's focused on the use of consumer tech products in a business environment — and I'm pretty positive it won't feature Robert Tinney's art or epic Jerry Pournelle columns. But I'm glad to see the legendary brand back in use rather than sitting in limbo."
Microsoft

New Windows Kernel Vulnerability Bypasses UAC 303

Posted by timothy from the happy-thanksgiving-everyone dept.
xsee writes "A new vulnerability in the Windows kernel was disclosed Wednesday that could allow malware to attain administrative privileges by bypassing User Account Control (UAC). Combined with the unpatched Internet Explorer vulnerability in the wild this could be a very bad omen for Windows users."
Social Networks

The Ethics of Social Games 75

Posted by Soulskill from the push-button-for-endorphins dept.
Gamespot is running a story about the ethics and morality of the social games market, which in recent years has exploded to involve hundreds of millions of players. Between micro-transactions, getting players to recruit friends, and the thin line between compelling games and addictive games, there are plenty of opportunities for developers to stray into shady practices. Quoting: "The most successful social games to date have used very simple gameplay mechanics, encouraging neither strategy nor dexterity but regular interaction with the game ... Although undeniably successful, the existing social game framework has been the subject of much debate among game developers from every corner of the game industry, from the mainstream to the indie community. Some, like Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen, are particularly strident in their assessment. 'Social games tend to have a really seedy and abusive means of manipulation that they use to rope people in and keep them in,' McMillen said. 'People are so tricked into that that they'll actually spend real money on something that does absolutely nothing, nothing at all.'
Bug

Submission + - Serious design flaw in Western Digital's Velocirap (livingagile.com)

Submitted by MarkSmeltzer
MarkSmeltzer writes: There are numerous forum posts (see Google search results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2204.04V01%22+49+raptor) about the flaw in Western Digital's Velociraptor drives that I found while researching a problem that I was having with my servers that are running these drives. In Living Agile's server farm there are over 50 Velociraptor drives, and each of the servers that are using these drives would have major disk problems every few months.

It turns out that any Western Digital Velociraptor drive that is running firmware version 04.04V01 has the following flaw: Every 49.71 days (49 days 17 hours and 4 seconds), any hard drive running the 04.04V01 firmware will experience a delay of roughly seven seconds. This delay is sufficient to cause most RAID controllers to fail the affected drives whenever this delay occurs. If there are sufficiently many affected drives in a RAID set that experience this delay at the same time, all of the affected volumes will also fail.
Databases

Submission + - SAP buying Sybase (nytimes.com)

Submitted by darealpat
darealpat writes: The New York times is reporting that Sybase is being bought by SAP. Implications fly.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Close