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Microsoft

Maine To Skip Vista, Go Directly To Windows 7 242

Posted by kdawson from the should-have-hired-stephen-king dept.
Preedit writes "The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft. An internal state document (dated September 15) uncovered by Infoweek reveals that Maine will not be upgrading its more than 11,000 personal computing devices from XP to Vista — ever. Instead, it's going to wait until Windows 7 ships in 2010 and hope for the best. The news is in line with a survey that shows only 4% of businesses in the UK have upgraded to Vista, the story notes. So much for that $300 million Seinfeld campaign." A commenter on the article makes the point that Maine's signing an enterprise software license with Microsoft means that Redmond doesn't really lose out on this deal; it simply allows the state to upgrade its equipment and software on its own time.
Handhelds

Submission + - Pandora Console Ready for Preorders 3

Submitted by Croakyvoice
Croakyvoice writes: Finally months after the official announcement 3000 lucky people can now preorder Pandora, the Worlds fastest handheld console that boasts a processor capable of up to 900MHZ, PowerVR 3D Graphics, a large 800x480 LCD Touchscreen, Wifi, Bluetooth, USB, Dual SD Card Slots, TV Out, Dual analogue and digital controls, a clamshell DS Lite style shape and a 43 button mini keyboard.The Console already boasts an amazing amount of ready to be released software such as Ubuntu and many full speed emulators for systems such as Snes, Amiga, Megadrive and many more that are not publically announced yet. The Console is as powerful as original Xbox and on a par with the Nintedo Wii, Those Interested should visit OpenPandora.Org the home of the Pandora Console. For the full history of news about the Pandora from start until now check out the Pandora Homebrew Site
Music

Journal SPAM: Who Are the Pirates

Journal by dizzyobrian

Live 365 claims that up to 56% of its musical broadcasts are Indie. This compares with regular AM and FM radio where only 10-13% is Indie and so it would seem that Live 365 plays up to 4 times as much Indie.
My source for this is;[spam URL stripped]
Now, back in April, Sound Exchange and RIAA obtained legal authority to collect royalties for any digital performance and distribute the money to Indie Artists and Indie labels, sort of li
Wireless Networking

GPL Code Found In OpenBSD Wireless Driver 671

Posted by kdawson from the cross-licensing dept.
NormalVisual writes "The mailing lists were buzzing recently when Michael Buesch, one of the maintainers for the GPL'd bc43xx Broadcom wireless chip driver project, called the OpenBSD folks to task for apparently including code without permission from his project in the OpenBSD bcw project, which aims to provide functionality with Broadcom wireless chips under that OS. It seems that the problem has been resolved for now with the BSD driver author totally giving up on the project and Theo De Raadt taking the position that Buesch's posts on the subject were 'inhuman.'" More commentary from the BSD community is over at undeadly.org.
Microsoft

EU Rejects Microsoft Royalty Proposal 274

Posted by samzenpus from the no-money-for-you dept.
pallmall1 writes "According to MSNBC, The Financial Times has reported that the EU is going to drastically reduce or even eliminate Microsoft's proposed royalties on interoperability information required to be released by the EU's antitrust ruling issued three years ago. According to a confidential EU document, "Microsoft will be forced to hand over to rivals what the group claims is sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no compensation...". Even Neil Barrett, the expert picked by both Microsoft and the EU to oversee Microsoft's compliance with the 2004 ruling, says a zero percent royalty would be 'better.'"
Windows

HardOCP Spends 30 Days With Vista 662

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the second-verse-same-as-the-first dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
Censorship

EFF Forces DMCA Abuser to Apologize 222

Posted by samzenpus from the depths-of-my-mothers-basement-I-stab-at-thee dept.
destinyland writes "The EFF just announced victory over a serial abuser of DMCA copyright notices. To set an example, their settlement required Michael Crook to record a video apology to the entire internet for interfering with free speech. He's also required to withdraw every bogus DMCA notice, and refrain from future bogus notices, never contest the original image again, and take a remedial class on copyright law. He'd attempted to use flaws in the DMCA to censor an embarrassing picture of himself that he just didn't want appearing online — but instead the whole thing backfired."

Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads 891

Posted by Zonk from the oh-bill dept.
fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that 'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."

Gentoo on the PS3 - Full Install Instructions 239

Posted by CmdrTaco from the white-knight-hasn't-shipped-yet-anyway dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it. His requirements — Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run. He wanted to make the full use of his Linux install, so he needed a distro which wouldn't hold him back with frustrating problems. The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user. Having used Gentoo extensively, I knew that this would be the solution to my problems. What follows is full install instructions, plus personal opinions, on why Gentoo is better than Fedora Core or YDL on the PS3"
Red Hat Software

Fedora Project to Help Revitalize RPM 334

Posted by CowboyNeal from the breathing-life-back-in dept.
-=Moridin=- writes "The Fedora Project has announced plans to revitalize RPM, the package manager used by many Linux distros. According to the announcement, 'Job #1 is to take the current RPM codebase and clean it up, and in doing so work with all the other people and groups who rely on RPM to build a first-rate upstream project.' For more information, see the the RPM web site and the new wiki-based RPM FAQ. The issue of RPM's upstream development has been a thorny issue ever since Jeff Johnson, the original maintainer of RPM, left Red Hat."

First Blu-ray Drives Won't play Blu-ray Movies 329

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thanks-for-warning-us dept.
aapold writes "Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs. Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format." All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

A Different Kind of WGA 'Problem' 348

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the foolproof-just-found-a-better-fool dept.
Ed Bott recently attempted to scout out the problems reported in so many horror stories floating around the net relating to Microsoft's WGA. He did experience problems, however, not the ones that you might expect. He intentionally installed a pirated copy of Windows XP to see how the process worked but was unable to get WGA to recognize his computer as pirated. From the article: "I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try. But these same people want us to believe that the WGA software they've developed is nearly foolproof. They claim that all but "a fraction of a percent" of those 60 million people who've been denied access to Microsoft updates and downloads are guilty, guilty, guilty. Right."

The UK's Total Surveillance 439

Posted by Zonk from the queen-watches-what-you-eat dept.
Budenny writes "The Register has a story in its ongoing coverage of the UK ID Card story. This one suggests, with links to a weekend news story, that the Prime Minister in waiting has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use ... And that data should flow back from the police database to (eg) a loyalty card use. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket!"

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