Maybe he’s reading too much into Ballmer’s lack of enthusiasm. Maybe’s Steve’s mellowing. Maybe he was bummed out about having to lay off more people. Maybe he was coming down with swine flu. Or maybe “Window 7 has done quite well” isn’t “quite well” enough.
Shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to be having trouble finding something nice to say about Windows 7’s launch.
Analysts seem to think Windows 7 has done quite well, but the man who knows all the figures seems to be keeping uncharacteristically quiet.
When hacks at ComputerWorld asked Ballmer how Windows 7 was doing, he said “er… its fantastic… er, in Japan.”
“It is helping to spur PC sales… um… in Japan. We’ve had a great response… in Japan. The first ten days were bigger than the first ten days of XP or Vista or any other Windows launch that we have done… in Japan.”
True he was talking to a Japanese news conference, but it is rare that the great man is that specific. If it was really doing well in Japan and everywhere else we would expect him to start waving his arms, flinging chairs and shouting, “I rule the world, baby!”
Less than two weeks after announcing that it would be the sole sponsor of Fox’s November 8 “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” Microsoft has pulled out.
MACFARLANE According to Variety’s Mike Schneider, who broke the story, everything was humming along just fine until the folks at Microsoft went to the taping of the special last week and were shocked, shocked to find racy humor and tasteless jokes about deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest.
The brave and the foolish. My 5 year old XP laptop is dying today so I went to Fry’s to get a new laptop. I was thinking that the Vista laptops would be heavily discounted but the Windows 7 computers were both newer and cheaper. Generally I don’t buy a Microsoft OS until at least service pack 1. But I’m taking a chance here so let’s see how it works. I’m using my Acer netbook to write this and going to do the install live and blog about it while it happens. So if it works then that’s what I’ll write. If it doesn’t then it gets slammed. So refresh this article today (Oct 24) because this is a live review.
Just out of idle curiosity, how many apps are in Microsoft’s Marketplace app store? I can’t tell since apparently you can’t get to it via their website without a Windows-based phone. Unlike that other company.
Comforting anecdotes in health care news that we are paying an arm and a leg for. I wonder how many go unreported.
The maker of a life-saving radiation therapy device has patched a software bug that could cause the system’s emergency stop button to fail to stop, following an incident at a Cleveland hospital in which medical staff had to physically pull a patient from the maw of the machine.
The bug affected the Gamma Knife, a device resembling a CT scan machine that focuses radiation on a patient’s brain tumor while leaving surrounding tissue untouched. A patient lies down on a motorized couch that glides into a chamber, where 201 emitters focus radiation on the treatment area from different angles. The patient wears a specialized helmet screwed onto his skull to ensure that his head doesn’t move and expose the wrong part of the brain to the machine’s pinpoint tumor-zapping beams.
[...]
When the hospital called the company that makes the Gamma Knife, it learned that there was a “known software bug problem” affecting the unit’s couch sensors. Known, anyway, to the company, Stockholm-based Elekta AB.
“Elekta was aware of the software ‘bug’ at the time of the December 2008 event and had implemented actions to correct the ‘bug’ in a future software release,” says Thomas Valentine, director of quality assurance and regulatory affairs for the Elekta’s U.S. arm, in an e-mail.
Since then, he adds, “The ‘bug’ has been corrected in software upgrades that have been implemented to all of the affected sites in the U.S. The U.S. NRC was notified of the completed status of software upgrades to correct the identified ‘bug’.”
We don’t know why “bug” is in quotes; surely this wasn’t a feature.
And then there was this:
The chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Thursday that he regretted the “circumstances” that subjected 206 patients to radiation overdoses and laid out reforms made since the hospital discovered that a CT scanner had been set erroneously for 18 months.
“New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorization. ‘The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.’ There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user’s express consent, which Geist says will ‘leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance.’”
On the other hand, if you got a bunch of 10-year old script kiddies together they could probably do some interesting hacking. Between milk and cookie breaks, of course.
Be ready for both defense and offense. Cover all routes of attack. Practice careful surveillance. All of these would seemingly be logical paradigms for our nation’s cybersecurity efforts. However, a new report takes a different bent and says that the nation shouldn’t make cybersecurity its top priority and instead should focus on reallocating limited resources to defence of critical infrastructure.
The new report from the RAND Corporation (pdf) says that electric power, telephone service, banking, and military command and control in the U.S. are all accessible and able to be attacked from the internet.
[...]
Martin C. Libicki, the report’s lead author and senior management scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, adds, “Adversaries in future wars are likely to go after each other’s information systems using computer hacking. The lessons from traditional warfare cannot be adapted to apply to attacks on computer networks. Cyberspace must be addressed in its own terms.”
[...]
According to the report, military networks should be top priority when it comes to defense, as attacks on military networks are potentially the most potent. They describe a hypothetical scenario in which an enemy could silence missile defenses of a nation and then pound its critical targets with rockets.
The report says that offensive cyberwarfare is largely useless as it tends to bother, but not generally disarm adversaries.
“T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers.”
NVIDIA is killing the GTX260, GTX275, and GTX285 with the GTX295 almost assured to follow as it (Nvidia: NVDA) abandons the high and mid range graphics card market. Due to a massive series of engineering failures, nearly all of the company’s product line is financially under water, and mismanagement seems to be killing the company.
Not even an hour after we laid out the financial woes surrounding the Nvidia GTX275 and GTX260, word reached us that they are dead. Normally, this would be an update to the original article, but this news has enough dire implications that it needs its own story. Nvidia is in desperate shape, whoop-ass has turned to ash, and the wagons can’t be circled any tighter.
Word from sources deep in the bowels of 2701 San Tomas Expressway tell us that the OEMs have been notified that the GTX285 is EOL’d, the GTX260 is EOL in November or December depending on a few extraneous issues, and the GTX275 will be EOL’d within 2 weeks. I would expect this to happen around the time ATI launches its Juniper based boards, so before October 22.
Having just recently ended the years of never ending pain he’s suffered at the hands of Microsoft products and converted fully to the Mac, your Uncle Dave is glad he can skip all this. I feel the article writer’s pain.
The official release of Windows 7 is only a few weeks away, and if you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking yourself what effect this will have on your lives. [...] I had to turn to eBay, where leaked copies have shown up recently. $150 and two days later, a package of bubble wrapped, technological delights arrived on my doorstep. I giddily tore open the packaging to reveal the contents.
Also included, but not pictured, was a small note from the seller, making some pretty inflammatory claims about my mental capacity. I took the matter up with eBay Fraud Protection, but they had similarly unkind things to say about my Internet savvy, only they used longer words. [...] I decided to plow ahead with my original plan. So below I present my review of “Windows 7.”
[...]
Right in the desktop was a link to something called “The Microsoft Network” which the instruction manual promised would provide the unheard of ability to use chat rooms or check the weather. Unfortunately, the set up didn’t seem to work–it evidently requires a phone line to work, and I don’t actually have one of those. So be advised that to fully utilize Windows 7, and experience all of its weather checking glory, you’ll require some pretty specialized telecom equipment.
[...]
Unless you’re one of those deviants who always has to have the latest OS, or have very specialized faxing needs, I’d strongly recommend avoiding Windows 7 until at least the first Service Pack is released.
Will this be a way for ‘death panels’ to get rid of expensive heart patients? Jolt ‘em, kill ‘em, remove the hack so they can’t be tracked.
A US researcher is calling for legislation to enforce tighter security on implanted cardiac devices after he hacked one wirelessly to produce a potentially fatal electric shock.
The scenario may sound like something out of a detective novel or far-fetched thriller movie script but the danger is real and should be taken seriously, says Kevin Fu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, who specialises in the security of RFID systems.
[...]
Doctors can access modern pacemakers and defibrillators over the Internet via a short-range wireless link similar to those used in RFID devices. The system allows them to monitor patients remotely and install software updates.
This means a hacker could access confidential medical information as well as reprogram the devices, Fu says.
[...]
The hacking device could be built into something the size of a cellphone and infect IMDs with malware randomly as the killer walked down the street.
25% off eHarmony subscription with code EHTECH 12-percent discount forever with code TECH 10-percent discount and free month using TECH10 10-percent or 30 dollars off weekly car rental!
Get 10-percent discount on car rental!
Discounts on domain names!
Shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to be having trouble finding something nice to say about Windows 7’s launch.
The maker of a life-saving radiation therapy device has 
“New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently 
Be ready for both defense and offense. Cover all routes of attack. Practice careful surveillance. All of these would seemingly be logical paradigms for our nation’s cybersecurity efforts. However, a new report takes a different bent and says that the nation 
The official release of Windows 7 is only a few weeks away, and if you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking yourself what effect this will have on your lives. [...] I had to turn to eBay, where leaked copies have shown up recently. $150 and two days later, a package of bubble wrapped, technological delights arrived on my doorstep. I giddily tore open the packaging to reveal the contents.
A US researcher is calling for legislation to enforce tighter security on implanted cardiac devices after he 
