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Ballmer Repeats Threats Against Linux 470

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-can-only-end-badly dept.
daria42 writes "Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property. In a no-nonsense presentation to New York financial analysts last week, Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world.""
Security

Flaw Found in Apple Bug-Fix Tool 168

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the month-of-bug-creation dept.
eldavojohn writes "The Month of Apple Bugs (MOAB) is well under way with a startling bug released Monday. From the description: 'Application Enhancer (APE) is affected by a local privilege escalation vulnerability which allows local users to gain root privileges.' APE is the same software used to deploy fixes during 'The Month of Apple Fixes' (MOAF). I know it's confusing but MOAB came first and MOAF was a developer's answer to the bugs — after all, the purpose of posting bugs is to have them identified, confirmed and eradicated. The article talks about potential remote root access by an intruder. Note that this is third party software that all of the bugs seem to be stemming from. I guess Apple has made a fairly secure system but they can't expect all third party developers to follow the same rigorous standards."

Vista to Create 50,000 Jobs in Europe 270

Posted by CowboyNeal from the working-for-the-man dept.
prostoalex writes "A Microsoft-sponsored study found that Vista will be a boon to European economy, as it 'will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there,' News.com reports. Europe will see a total of 1.2 mln paychecks thanks to the new operating system: 'In the six countries studied, more than 150,000 IT companies will produce, sell or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista in 2007 and will employ 400,000 people, IDC said. Another 650,000 will be employed in the IT departments of businesses that rely on Vista.'"

Comment Re:Of Course! (Score 1) 387

by j_d_williams (#16107854) Attached to: Linux Desktop Ready, Says Mainstream Media
It may be a little late in the discussion to post this but.. I made fun of Linspire/Freespire as much as any other self respecting geek, but since they made CNR free and soon open source I gave it a shot on my Laptop (a newish Sony wide screen that I've never had preconfigured right straight out of installing) - and to my amazement everything worked.
  • automount? Check. (Don't have an ipod but see next item.)
  • MP3? Check.
  • Sluggish filesystem? Nope. All the right things preloaded.
  • Remembers system volumes between reboots? Double check. It remembers and successfully discovers and mounts new ones. (And doesn't blow up if one is removed.)
  • Package manager? Double check. CNR for almost everything (with reviews, screenshots, ratings, who'd have thought?) Apt-get for if you want to get really advanced. Yep, they work together perfectly. Install with apt-get, uninstall with CNR or vice versa. (I was especially impressed with this.)
  • Slow boot time? ... Equal with XP Pro that I run on the same laptop. All that hardware detection does come at a price though I'm sure it could be optimized. Software hibrinate worked fine on my laptop, however, which makes the bootup time much shorter.
  • GUI? Freespire clearly went to a lot of work to make sure all their packages present a consistent, polished look and feel. Very slick and not very Windows or OSX (which I like).
  • Overly complex system settings? Nope. Easy control panel like interface for most things, more advanced interfaces not far behind. And gee, I don't have to sudo in order to change the time, go figure..
  • Laptop support? Mostly check. I've had trouble on my laptop with everything from its wide screen, to power management, to DMA, integrated wireless... list goes on. All that shocked me by just working with Freespire. Hardware suspend is still a little buggy though, my only complaint.
  • Live-CD? There but I never looked at it.. so ? Install was under 10 minutes though!!
OK, shameless plug for my new Linux desktop of choice complete. If it supported Active Directory authentication for logging in out of the box like OpenSuSE 10+ it would be my only Linux desktop. Oh, and Linspire isn't nearly as good as the Freespire version as far as I can tell (log in as root? yuk), so be sure not to pay for it.. go figure.

(Also, I do tend to up the security of Freespire's defaults but a small price to pay.)

Spirit Rover Reaches Safety 147

Posted by Zonk from the go-little-buddy-go dept.
dylanduck writes "Good news for rover fans - Spirit is safe for the winter. It had been heading for a north-tilting spot to make sure its solar panels got enough sunlight during the imminent winter to survive, when a sand trap appeared. But, despite its busted wheel, it scooted round and is now sitting pretty. From the article: 'We've got a safe rover,' says principal investigator Steve Squyres. 'That's huge news for us.'"

Algorithmic Political-Media-Mashup Vodcast 53

Posted by Hemos from the w-meets-chirac dept.
flexatone writes "Composer Christopher Ariza, author of the first algorithmic, computer-generated podcast, announces the next phase of his experimental political-media-mashup project: the babelcast-zoetrope. The babelcast-zoetrope employs the subscription model of the vodcast (RSS feed, iTMS subscription) to deliver timely multi-media artifacts of the contemporary media landscape. Generated with free, open-source software tools (such as athenaCL, Python, Csound, and ffmpeg), babelcast-zoetrope is an experimental, algorithmic, computer-generated video podcast. Sounds and images of U.S. and World leaders and commentators are algorithmically fragmented, distorted, and recombined into a media tapestry. New episodes are defined by a time period: audio and video sequences are constructed only with materials collected during this period, lasting from days to weeks."

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