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Comment Differentially Remembered (Score 2, Interesting) 384

by pbarnhart (#34162486) Attached to: Recalling Windows 1.0 At 25 Years
I was in the Air Force when this came out; I remember getting access to a MicroVAX and a Mac at a meeting in Colorado Springs (ever see a Tempest-Certified Mac - u-u-u-ugly box) and getting to see a demo of 1.0 about the same time. We all thought the Mac and Vax were the future - and that Windows seriously sucked. The Microsoft guy spent the whole time in the demo apologizing. When we were done, I remember another attendee opine that Microsoft would win the desktop battle. "Why" we all wanted to know. "Ever hear an Apple rep apologize for anything? Ever hear a DEC employee apologize for anything. These guys are tossing their stuff down from Mount Olympus. Microsoft actually seems to know they need to improve."
Windows

Submission + - Ballmer: we screwed up Windows Mobile (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has blasted the company's own mobile operating system at the firm's Venture Capital Summit. One tweet from an attendee claims Ballmer said the company had "screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already lauched WM7. They completely revamped the team". Another claims Ballmer said "we've pumped in some new talent. This will not happen again." It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was "not the full release we wanted"."
IT

Submission + - Up To 9% Of A Company's Machines Are Bot-Infected (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
ancientribe
ancientribe writes: "Bot infections are on the rise in businesses, and most come from botnets you've never heard of nor ever will. Botnet researchers at Damballa have found that nearly 60 percent of bot infections in organizations are from bot armies with only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from big-name botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface. And more businesses are getting hit: 7 to 9 percent of an organization's machines are bot-infected, up from 5- to 7 percent last year, according to Damballa."
It's funny. Laugh.

Pigeon Protocol Finds a Practical Purpose 113

Posted by timothy from the fly-away-little-one dept.
Selanit writes "Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon. One group back in 2001 successfully sent a PING command. But now there's a practical use for pigeon-based communications: photographers working for the white-water rafting company Rocky Mountain Adventures send memory sticks full of digital photos via homing pigeon so the photos will be ready when the rafters finish up. The company has details on how the pigeons are trained and equipped. It may not be a full implementation of the Pigeon Protocol, but it works in narrow canyons far off the beaten path — and just as David Waitzman presciently predicted, they occasionally suffer packet loss due to hawks and ospreys."
Programming

Contributing To a Project With a Reclusive Maintainer? 162

Posted by Soulskill from the pulling-a-davis dept.
zerointeger writes "I am still fairly new to programming in C, but I was asked to extend an open source authentication module by my employer. The project is complete, testing has been done and it works as designed. The extension/patch I have created is fairly robust, as it includes configuration options, help files, and several additional files. The problem is that I have been unable to make contact with the current maintainer about having this feature added. I think the only reason I'd like to see this included is to prevent any patching of later revisions. A few others I have spoken with agree that the patch would benefit administrators attempting to push Linux onto the desktop, as we have done at the University that employs me. Has anyone else submitted patches/extensions to what seems to be a black hole?"

Comment Its the baggage, not the mileage. (Score 1) 918

by pbarnhart (#27353467) Attached to: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?
On several occasions I've seen posting for IT and Web positions here in Austin that use the terms "youthful attitude." I've been asked blatantly how old I was. But its not "ageism" per se. It was more the baggage than the mileage. During one interview, the interviewer/biz owner commented on how "older people" have a lot more external commitments. For example, people 'my age' (4x) had to be home at night to take of kids or 'old parents.'
Space

How Water Forms in Interstellar Space at 10K 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-drink-a-lot-of-beer dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Water is the most abundant solid material in space. But although astronomers see it on planets, moons, in comets and in interstellar clouds, nobody has been able to show how it forms. In theory, it should form easily when oxygen and atomic hydrogen meet. The problem is that there is not enough of it floating around as gas in interstellar dust clouds. So instead, the thinking is that water must form when atomic hydrogen interacts with frozen solid oxygen on the surface of dust grains in these clouds. Now Japanese astronomers have demonstrated this process for the first time in the lab in conditions that simulate interstellar space. That's cool because all the water in the solar system, including almost every drop you drink on Earth today, must have formed in exactly this way more than 5 billion years ago in a pre-solar dustcloud (abstract)."
Spam

100 Email Bouncebacks - Welcome to Backscattering 316

Posted by timothy from the annoying-as-heck-if-heck-is-like-hell dept.
distefano links to a story on Computerworld, excerpting: "E-mail users are receiving an increasing number of bounceback spam, known as backscatter, and security experts say this kind of spam is growing. The bounceback e-mail messages come in at a trickle, maybe one or two every hour. The subject lines are disquieting: 'Cyails, Vygara nad Levytar,' 'UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you.' You eye your computer screen; you're nervous. What's going on ? Have you been hacked? Are you some kind of zombie botnet spammer? Nope, you're just getting a little backscatter — bounceback messages from legitimate e-mail servers that have been fooled by the spammers."
Networking

Use BitTorrent To Verify, Clean Up Files 212

Posted by timothy from the but-anything-bittorrent-is-for-terrorists dept.
jweatherley writes "I found a new (for me at least) use for BitTorrent. I had been trying to download beta 4 of the iPhone SDK for the last few days. First I downloaded the 1.5GB file from Apple's site. The download completed, but the disk image would not verify. I tried to install it anyway, but it fell over on the gcc4.2 package. Many things are cheap in India, but bandwidth is not one of them. I can't just download files > 1GB without worrying about reaching my monthly cap, and there are Doctor Who episodes to be watched. Fortunately we have uncapped hours in the night, so I downloaded it again. md5sum confirmed that the disk image differed from the previous one, but it still wouldn't verify, and fell over on gcc4.2 once more. Damn." That's not the end of the story, though — read on for a quick description of how BitTorrent saved the day in jweatherley's case.
Communications

Making Free Phone Calls With Google's GrandCentral 144

Posted by timothy from the you-will dept.
andrewmin writes with an enthusiastic pitch for Google's closed-beta call-aggregation service called GrandCentral, for which we non-beta-testers can at least reserve a number. Specifically, he's using GrandCentral in combination with Gizmo5 to make free VoiP calls. Excerpted: "Most of the time, I'm at my computer. Or near it. And if I had an internet device like a Nokia N810 or an iPod Touch, I'd have it with me 24/7. And since most of the time I'm at a place where there's a WiFi network, it makes sense for me to use VoIP rather than a regular phone line. ... I'm talking about making and receiving calls that are completely free (that is, $0.00/minute) forever (that is, no 30-day demo) for as much as you want (that is, no 30-day trial or five hour/week limit)."

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