They're paying us, but we won't say how much

25 cents.

BCS, Microsoft, Google and several universities are also involved

What a shame.

Ah, capitalism

Promoting the efficient use of resources again.

Great stuff.

Lamo

Nominal determinism at work there. I saw this tool in a news interview and he looked like a drugged zombie. I reckon the MIT connection is his master's speculation.

Headline slightly misleading ...

... It sounded like the new released kernel was half-baked. Turns out it's not.

No big deal, just think that could give the wrong impression.

a do-it-yourself operating system for super geeks

No longer interested in anything these people have to say to be honest. What is this, 1995?

Cool

I like the idea of a diverse web and have no problem with testing in four or five major browsers that all behave broadly similarly to each other anyway from a developer's perspective.

25% is a healthy browser 'market' share. Very healthy. You can't grow forever, and it would be nice if the other 75% was divvied up between other well-behaved browsers like Opera, Chromium, Safari etc. rather than being swallowed up by a new monopoly, no matter how friendly.

I'll keep using FF I think, but good on Chromium anyway, and the best of luck to it.

Wow, MS really are getting pretty close ...

... to actively killing for profit with this one.

People are too defeatist about platform lock-in I think, especially with web apps. A web application that only works in IE6 today could be working in several browsers in a couple of weeks given a motivated team of developers. Obviously depends on the size of the application and the extent of the lock in, but it's building for IE6 that's awkward, not adjusting for standards compliance and portability. The bulk of these applications can stay, we just need a bit of relatively superficial work.

Surely there are a lot of cases where a quick porting effort would pay off hundreds of times over if it meant your organisation could switch to a free desktop platform?

(And retraining of users is often a bit of a red herring as well, a lot of corporate users use two or three business applications and will need a five second orientation session to find the shortcuts to them on a new desktop, not expensive classroom training - if they spend most of the day in one or two web applications and those still look the same, I doubt they'll be panicking just because the icon on the 'start menu' has changed).

-1 for Spiceworks

Proprietary, closed-source, ad-supported and not very scalable, and requires an obsolete VMS-derived OS platform. I'm not saying it's junk, but it ticks all the 'not interested' boxes from my perspective. Just my opinion.

Cute

but I'd prefer the unadulterated classic. You could do actual stuff with that.

Yay!

That is all.

Thanks, MS

That's very helpful. This is the most useful thing Windows Help has done since letting you walk past the login screen into a command prompt.

I've had ...

... 20,000 job offers this morning. From Nigeria.

wonky, crash-prone standards of the time

Funny, I remember better stability back then than now.

As a user of baby HPC ...

.. I honestly can't imagine why I would want to use Windows for this. People who need HPC are generally happy with Unix-like environments. I'd rather save the license money and buy more silicon than stretch a wasteful point-and-drool 'familiar' UI around a real machine.

Windows on HPC is like faulty air conditioning in a racing car.

Software patents suck

Also, what's up with this article's rating? Either someone thinks the rating is there so we can express our emotional response to the subject matter, or I'd like to hear what someone thinks is so wrong with the article itself?

I mean, granted, it's a short and simple article, but unless it's inaccurate I think it's a good one.

Oh yeah, and software patents suck.

This is a pretty different filesystem though

Ceph is a distributed filesystem, and sounds fantastic for storing large numbers of files safely for quick simultaneous access by thousands of users. But you're right, who wants to do *that*? We all just want to edit videos of people falling over for YouTube and draw fugly diagrams that obscure more than they clarify.

Great stuff

"The GAO states up front that their review is mostly the result of interviews with a few 'experts,' the Copyright Alliance's response sniffed, "many of which were academics who have not been professional artists or creators or ever worked in a creative industry."

Unlike the Copyright Alliance output, which studiously avoids stating that it's based on the opinions of a few 'experts', many of which are not academics and have no understanding of statistics or cause and effect.

We need open standards for this stuff

not patents.

Does this mean ...

... OOXML is a 'standard' with zero implementations at this stage?

That would be priceless.

I'm just speculating

I haven't run the numbers, but isn't Century Gothic rather a wide font?

What does this do do paper consumption?

H.264

I see what they're up to here.

Ogg please.

For the security conscious

OpenBSD might be what you're looking for. It takes some getting used to, and you feel the inconvenience and feature lag that a stronger focus on security tends to cause, but in some roles it's still preferable.

Conspiracy theory

The bomb on the train failed to go off.

"In this release"

Sounds like the constant refrain was "Not in this release." My long-obsolete Nokia E61 is more functional than W7P sounds.

Anyone out there ...

... who can suggest any good alternatives to Paypal? I'm not sticking up for Paypal here, I'm actually asking (I use them at the moment and this has basically been the last straw).

I'll innovate

for a lollipop.

Re: What a rush!

What a weirdly enthusiastic comment. I have to assume it's sarcastic.

Words of wisdom

I just can't get over the fact that back in the stupid ages someone decided that was divinely inspired knowledge: "if your ox kills someone, throw stones at it until it's dead."

Cheers God, nice one, insightful stuff. Any more rules to live by?

Pfffft ...

That's the sound of my soft spot for Apple evaporating.

Software patents suck.

Put Microsoft in a rubber room

and the problem of malware infected PCs will go away by itself.

@Notas Badoff

I think it seems fairly clear:

"It is possible to invoke winhlp32.exe from Internet Explorer 8,7,6 using VBScript. Passing malicious .HLP file to winhlp32 could allow remote attacker to run arbitrary command. Additionally, there is a stack overflow vulnerability in winhlp32.exe."

So if winhlp32.exe was compiled with /GS (as on XP) you don't have to worry about the stack smashing, but the 'open a HLP file from MSIE' hole is still there, and because of Microsoft's apparent inability to produce a data file format without somehow making the data file a piece of active software (e.g. Word, Excel and friends), it's nasty enough without a stack smashing issue.

At least, that's how I understand it, but I'm ready to stand corrected.

Refutes!?

"The industry strongly refutes the allegation"

No, it just *denies* it. What is this, proof by vehement assertion?