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Comment Re:This is kind of stupid/obvious (Score 1) 638

by Tideflat (#35922102) Attached to: Mac Users More Liberal Than Windows Users
Software isn't everything. The hardware is fairly "walled garden", one can't just buy any 86x computer, and install MacOSX on it. One has to buy the computer from Apple. Windows can be installed on (or bought) a extremely high number of computers compared to MacOSX. It can even be installed on computers that one builds from parts from entirely different manufacturers. (Linux can do this all to and even more.)
Microsoft

Internet Explorer 10 Drops Vista Support 438

Posted by timothy from the that-was-quick dept.
Pigskin-Referee writes "This week at Microsoft's MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 available — less than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer: the next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista. Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won't even run on Vista."
Government

Submission + - Utah Repeals Anti-Transparency Law (sltrib.com)

Submitted by oddjob1244
oddjob1244 writes: After enduring two weeks of public fury, Utah lawmakers voted Friday to repeal a bill that would have restricted public access to government records. While Senate President Michael Waddoups accused the media of lobbying on the issue and others blamed the press for biased coverage that turned citizens against them, Sen. Steve Urquhart said bluntly: "We messed up. It is nobody's fault but our's."

Michael Waddoups is indirectly blaming Slashdot from previous media coverage: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/23/202234/Utah-Works-To-Repeal-Anti-Transparency-Law and http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/15/1647251/Utah-Governor-Honored-With-Blackhole-Award
Idle

Submission + - Ohio man gets a $16.4 million cable bill (yahoo.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: You may have heard the story about the man living in a 14x60 trailer who got a $12,864 electric bill, or the Corpus Christie man who was billed $7.7 million by his water company, or the Canadian whose cell phone provider hit him up for $85,000...

In this case an Ohio man's attempt to make a payment on his cable bill to Time Warner was rejected, and he learned that the company had calculated his past-due amount at more than $16 million.
NASA

NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers 148

Posted by samzenpus from the space-sharks dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "MIT Technology Review reports that various ideas have been floated for removing space junk, most of them hugely expensive, but now James Mason at NASA Ames Research Center has come up with the much cheaper option of zapping individual pieces of junk with a ground-based laser, to slow them down so that they eventually de-orbit. Mason estimates that a device to test the reversal of the Kessler syndrome could be put together for a million dollars, which would have to be shared by many space-faring nations, to avoid the inevitable legal issues that using such a device would raise. 'The scheme requires launching nothing into space — except photons (PDF) — and requires no on-orbit interaction — except photon pressure. It is thus less likely to create additional debris risk in comparison to most debris removal schemes,' writes Mason. 'Eventually the concept may lead to an operational international system for shielding satellites and large debris objects from a majority of collisions as well as providing high accuracy debris tracking data and propellant-less station keeping for smallsats.'"
Firefox

Submission + - Investigating the Performance of Firefox 4 and IE9 (mozillazine.org)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan has posted an article on his blog in which he investigates the performance differences between Firefox 4 and IE9. He writes, 'As I explained in my last post, Microsoft's PR about "full hardware acceleration" is a myth. But it's true that some graphics benchmarks consistently report better scores for IE9 than for Firefox, so over the last few days I've been looking into that. Below I'll explain the details [of] what I've found about various commonly-cited benchmarks, but the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).'
Education

Submission + - Falling Demand for Brains?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times that information technology seems to be reducing, not increasing, the demand for highly educated workers (reg. may be required), because a lot of what highly educated workers do could actually be replaced by sophisticated information processing. One good recent example is how software is replacing the teams of lawyers who used to do document research. “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” says Bill Herr, a lawyer at a major chemical company who used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.” If true this raises a number of interesting questions. "One is whether emphasizing education — even aside from the fact that the big rise in inequality has taken place among the highly educated — is, in effect, fighting the last war," writes Krugman. "Another is how we [can] have a decent society if and when even highly educated workers can’t command a middle-class income." Remember the Luddites weren’t the poorest of the poor, they were skilled artisans whose skills had suddenly been devalued by new technology."
Cellphones

Submission + - Taxes on Cell Phones Hit All-Time High

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: As the breakdown of top ten states with the higest and lowest taxes shows, the wireless consumers in Nebraska, Washington, and New York pay more than 20 percent of their wireless bills in taxes and fees, mostly due to the proliferation of archaic or duplicated surcharges.Experts from KSE Partners spent five years monitoring the federal, state, and local taxes imposed on wireless consumers. According to their analysis wireless taxes grew three times faster than the retail sales rate between 2007 and 2010. The reason behind this is that legislators and Congressmen are targeting the wireless industry for tax money to relieve the burden from more recession-starved industries. Infact a few states even tax wireless consumers for non wireless-related projects, for instance Utah funds its poison-control centers with a poison-control surcharge found on wireless bills, and in 2009 Wisconsin imposed a police and fire protection fee to subsidize local departments.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's New Plan For Keeping the Internet Safe (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney used to think it was the responsibility of ISPs to keep hacked PCs off the Internet. Now, he says the burden should be on consumers. Speaking at the RSA Conference, Charney suggested that the solution may be for consumers to share trusted certificates about the health of their personal computer: 'The user remains in control. The user can say I don't want to pass a health certificate,' he said 'There may be consequences for that decision, but you can do it.'
Privacy

How Your Username May Betray You 308

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-are-a-number-not-a-name dept.
An anonymous reader writes "By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture the users."

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