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Halloween X: Follow The Money 3 Mar 2004 Excuse me, did we say in Halloween IX that Microsoft's under-the-table payoff to SCO for attacking Linux was just eleven million dollars? Turns out we were off by an order of magnitude ? it was much, much more than that. The document below was emailed to me by an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO. He tells me the typos and syntax bobbles were in the original. I cannot certify its authenticity, but I presume that IBM's, Red Hat's, Novell's, AutoZone's, and Daimler-Chryler's lawyers can subpoena the original. Explanatory comments are interspersed in [...].....

I created a thread here a couple weeks back. I was asking for help with a Web site that I was planning on building for the OSU College Republicans. Well I have now built that Web site, and you can view it here. Let me know what you think of it. But I do have another problem I would like some help with. Our Public Relations manager somehow made it to where the Web site is now also available at www.osurepublicans.comBUT when you go to that one...it brings up an error. It says that a run time error has occured,...

ONDON, March 2 — The terrorism investigation code-named Mont Blanc began almost by accident in April 2002, when authorities intercepted a cellphone call that lasted less than a minute and involved not a single word of conversation. Investigators, suspicious that the call was a signal between terrorists, followed the trail first to one terror suspect, then to others, and eventually to terror cells on three continents. What tied them together was a computer chip smaller than a fingernail. But before the investigation wound down in recent weeks, its global net caught dozens of suspected Qaeda members and disrupted at least...

Hacks, Viruses, Scams & Spam Virus writers trade insults as e-mail users suffer Some 20 variants spreading across Net at furious rate By Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent MSNBC Updated: 3:31 p.m. ET March  03, 2004 With 20 variations of the Mydoom, Netsky and Bagle viruses circulating around the Internet, it's becoming clear that computer virus writers are engaged in some kind of can-you-top-this game. And it's Internet users who are suffering collateral damage.  advertisement E-mail inboxes around the world are teeming with cryptic notes that have simple messages like "Here is the file," or "I want a reply." When antivirus...

Dear Aiden, I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this software conference in Dublin. You came up to me and told me how the stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is closed-source, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for software are evil anyways - especially Microsoft. Unfortunately I don't have your email, but I am sure this will reach you. First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you...

To the outsider, and even to me for some time, the various lawsuits involving the SCO Group follow a relatively simple story line. I'm not a lawyer, but after many interviews with the involved parties and lawyers, the case boils down to divergent interpretations of the subject matter. The Linux operating system was coming on strong. A group of individuals, some with a history of using litigation to extract wealth from other parties, started to behave like pit bulls. They clamped onto the Linux ecosystem in hopes of exploiting it for riches that for the most part have not accrued...

The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service     Chips to ease Microsoft's big security nightmare   10:00 22 February 04   Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.   Chip makers are planning a new generation of microprocessors that should plug the gaps that led Microsoft to issue a "critical security alert" last week.The alert was sparked by the discovery that a raft of Microsoft programs were vulnerable to a problem called "buffer overflow", which hackers can exploit to extract private information from a PC. And the risk of such attacks only worsened when, two...

SAN MATEO, Calif. — When the Mars rover Spirit went dark on Jan.21 a Jet Propulsion Laboratory team undertook to reprogram the craft's computer only to find themselves introducing an unpredictable sequences of events. The trouble with the Mars rover Spirit started much earlier in the mission than the day the craft stopped communicating with ground controllers. "It was recognized just after [the June 2003] launch that there were some serious shortcomings in the code that had been put into the launch load of software," said JPL data management engineer Roger Klemm. "The code was reworked, and a complete new...

New X-ray observations by orbiting satellites have given astronomers their first telling evidence that appears to confirm what had been only theory: that a star is doomed if it ventures too close to a supermassive black hole. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency announced yesterday the detection of a brilliant flare of X-rays from the heart of a distant galaxy, followed by a fading afterglow. After analysis, an international team of scientists concluded that the telescopes had witnessed the overpowering gravity of a black hole as it tore apart a star and gobbled up a...

By ANDREW BRIDGES (AP) This an artist's Illustration of the RX J1242-11 system depicting how the catastrophic destruction...Full Image   PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Two space observatories have provided the first strong evidence of a supermassive black hole stretching, tearing apart and partially gobbling up a star flung into reach of its enormous gravity, astronomers said Wednesday. The event had long been predicted by theory but never confirmed. A powerful X-ray blast drew the attention of astronomers to the event, located near the center of a galaxy about 700 million light-years from Earth. The international team of astronomers believe gases...

My question is this, do RoadRunner customers get treated as if they were idiots, or do they get service?

Despite all the promise of pollution-free vehicles, a transportation system based on hydrogen fuel cells is anything but a sure bet, members of a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded last week. Even if the most optimistic predictions prove true, and the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicles reach commercial showrooms by 2015, it would take at least another quarter-century before they have a major impact on the market, the panel concluded. "This is a tremendously important, transforming opportunity we are talking about, but it's not going to happen with current technology and current knowledge," said Dan Sperling, a panel member...

Prescott Arrives : Intel debuts their new Prescott core today by launching 4 new CPUs while also scaling legacy architectures. We benchmark them all. Introduction Intel has been promising their new core for a while now and on this Super Bowl Sunday they finally deliver. Intel teases us with four new Prescott cores, a newly clocked Gallatin core, and the final chapter of the Northwood core. We put the 3.2GHz CPUs head to head to head and of course throw in Athlon64s and an AthlonFX-51 in order to find out who is king of the silicon. Officially, Prescotts in 2.8GHz,...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — That computer on your desk is just your helper. But soon it may become a very close friend. Now it sends your e-mails, links you to the Web, does your computations, and pays your bills. Soon it could warn you when you’re talking too much at a meeting, if scientists at Sandia National Laboratories’ Advanced Concepts Group have their way. Or it could alert others in your group to be attentive when you have something important to say. Aided by tiny sensors and transmitters called a PAL (Personal Assistance Link) your machine (with your permission) will become...

Nanotech Spy Eyes Life Inside The Cell In Prey, Michael Crichton's tale of nanotech gone awry, a swarm of light-sensitive nanoparticles swim through a human body, creating the ultimate medical imaging system. In the real world, biochemists are hoping to go one step further, deploying viruses as "nano-cameras" to get a unique picture of what goes on inside living cells and a greater understanding of how viruses themselves work. A team led by Bogdan Dragnea at Indiana University in Bloomington is exploiting the ability of viruses laden with gold to break into cells, along with the viral shell's own telltale...

ANN ARBOR---Imagine your roof covered with a thin film of organic molecules busily converting sunlight into electricity. Visualize tiny molecular flashlights illuminating the DNA of living cells. Picture microscopic optical sensors that change color when exposed to trace amounts of chemicals. Science fiction? Scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign don't think so. They have developed a new class of large dendrimer supermolecules which, they say, could one day be used for all these applications and more. "Normally, light energy disperses randomly throughout a molecule," said Raoul Kopelman, the U-M's Kasimir Fajans Professor of...

Kill Clippy! - The Microsoft Office Assistant AdministrationMicrosoft Office Product Producer : Microsoft / Internet : http://www.microsoft.comArticle C9P54A3220 / Language ENGIn this article… Begin of this article…What Is Clippy?Clippy is our name for that little paperclip that appears in Microsoft Office 97 — the official name is the Office Assistant. It can also appear as a dog, cat, robot, even Shakespeare or Einstein! Whatever you call it, Clippy is meant to help you with suggestions and tips while you work. But like many ideas from the Microsoft marketing department, this one is considered by many to be a persistent nuisance....

Intel plans to demonstrate a 64-bit revamp of its Xeon and Pentium processors in mid-February--an endorsement of a major rival's strategy and a troubling development for Intel's Itanium chip. The demo, which follows the AMD64 approach of Intel foe Advanced Micro Devices, is expected at the Intel developer conference, Feb. 17 through 19 in San Francisco, said sources familiar with the plan. Intel had code-named the technology Yamhill but now calls it CT, sources said. Adding 64-bit features would let "x86" chips such as Intel's Xeon and Pentium overcome today's 4GB memory limit but would undermine the hope that Intel's...

I found a computer that looks nice. I am going to have to upgrade to XP pro. I will need to buy a new screen. But I cannot tell if this is a good buy and a good computer. It costs about $900. Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition AMD Athlon™ 64-bit Processor 3200+ Hypertransport™ Technology (1600MHz Bus) 512MB PC2700 DDR Memory 80GB† 7200RPM Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive CD-RW / DVD-RW Drive w/ Ulead VideoStudio 6 Realtek® Integrated Audio 128MB ATI® RADEON 9200 SE AGP 8x Video Card 56K v.92 Send/Receive Fax Modem Realtek Integrated 10/100 Ethernet Controller 7 in 1...

Do you know about United States Patent No. 6,671,714? You should. The patent, recently granted to one Frank Weyer of Beverly Hills, California, grants the patent holder full rights to:A method for assigning URL's and e-mail addresses to members of a group comprising the steps of: assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"; and assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@subdomain.domain;" Sound familiar? Well, it should, because the patent describes what is essentially one of the most basic, most crucial underlying structures of the World Wide Web, namely the...

i just scanned my computer for viruses and i came across the WORM SPYBOT.X with trendmircro's house call and it told me its non cleanable and after going to a few sites to see whether or not i can get rid of it,i came up short (i checked a few virus sites and norton's site as well) any help is appreciated thanks, Regards from a very ice cold michigan Dan

I would like to learn more about firewalls. I would appreciate any input that knowledgeable freepers can contribute. First off I am using theWindows XP Firewall. It says in that link that the firewall blocks all incoming "packets".First off what is a "packet" and what does it do? I have checked here but I don't quite get all the lingo yet. One thing it says in there is: Before installing personal firewall software on a Windows XP computer, be sure that the firewall built into Windows XP is turned off. Never use two software firewalls at the same time. Why...

Hi all; After reading/hearing various opinions on the reliability of various CD-R recording materials ("the blue cyanine-coated CD-Rs are the least reliable, while the silver- and gold-colored CD-Rs are most reliable"), I wanted to hear whether any FReepers were knowledgeable about this. I'm archiving family photos and music onto CD-R and want to use the most durable medium, if any difference exists.

Can anyone with a better grasp on the process explain how the process of selling a domain name works? Has anyone here ever sold a domain name and transferred it to another person? I see all of these domain names for sale on the internet and am curious just how would one go about buying or selling a domain name (not registering a new one)?

  Home | Alexander Order | Coats-of-Arms | Articles | Latest News | Art Gallery | Spiritual Corner WHY EXPLORE SPACE? By Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger Member of the Alexander Order   The "Kegeldüsse," the rocket motor designed and tested by Prof. Hermann Oberth, a colleague and friend of Ernst Stuhlinger. Hermann Oberth, the "father of space flight" was a teacher and mentor of the legendary Wernher von Braun. Ernst Stuhlinger, as the "director of advanced space travel research," was the third member of this trio of space travel pioneers OBERTH-von BRAUN-STUHLINGER.   Some of the reasons for exploring space, when...

Internet Epistemology: How the Internet is changing the way we live and think. by Michael Francisco If it's not on the internet, does it really exist? Probably not. If you can't find the answer to a question using Google, then perhaps it's not worth knowing. Three in the morning, you want to buy an out of print book? No problem. The internet has everything, or so it seems.… The medium of the internet is fundamentally changing the way we view the world. Stealing a page from the playbook of Neal Postman, I contend that the internet is changing our epistemology...

The first use of the tools on the arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit reveals puzzles about the soil it examined and raises anticipation about what the tool will find during its studies of a martian rock. Today and overnight tonight, Spirit is using its microscope and two up-close spectrometers on a football-sized rock called Adirondack, said Jennifer Trosper, mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We're really happy with the way the spacecraft continues to work for us," Trosper said. The large amount of data -- nearly 100 megabits -- transmitted from Spirit in a single...

Chip war ratches up several notches By Charlie Demerjian: Monday 19 January 2004, 12:45 OH HOW time flies. With people still gasping over A64 3400+ reviews, and Intel about to introduce the 3.4GHz models, some Prescott, some not, are we ready for the next round from AMD? Ready or not, they are coming at the end of March. Birds singing in our ears have told us that when the S939 boards are launched in about two months, they will be accompanied by A64 3700+ chips. If AMD keeps to the schedule, they will beat their own roadmaps, even if it...

'Like showing up on the day of the final exam and saying you didn't have time to read the book yet' In SCO's response to a court order that it provide evidence to IBM on which it can build its defence, it asked for a further 90 days to fully comply - a request that may meet with a cool reception when the two parties meet in court later this month. The order to compel discovery granted to IBM 12 December last year meant SCO had to provide the documentation IBM requested within 30 days and to the court's satisfaction....

OAKLAND, Calif., Jan. 13 — At least three advanced diagnostic tests suggest that an experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has cracked open protons and neutrons like subatomic eggs to create a primordial form of matter that last existed when the universe was roughly one-millionth of a second old, scientists said here on Tuesday. The hot, dense substance, called a quark-gluon plasma, has managed to generate intense disputes in the 15 years or so in which scientists have pursued it. In 2000, a major European laboratory claimed that it had, for the first time, liberated particles called quarks from where...

I would like to know if any of you know what time President Bush will speak about space exploration. I probably would not be able to watch it so I thought it would to be nice if you guys keep me informed and post your opinions about it.

Every so often nature surprises us by offering a simple solution to a seemingly impossible problem. Now it seems that the great scourge of the 21st century, rogue nuclear weapons, also may yield to a natural remedy--sunlight. Homeland security experts worry less about a repeat of the events of September 11 than they do the detonation of a crude nuclear weapon in a major city. Their nightmare scenario derives from two facts. The first is that the world is awash in dangerous nuclear materials. A small amount exists in the form of enriched uranium and plutonium--needed to make atomic bombs....

<p>NEW YORK - As wonderful as Internet search engines are, they have a pretty big flaw. They often deliver too much information, and a lot of it isn't quite what we're looking for. Who really bothers to read the dozens of pages of results that Google generates?</p>

In experiment that tracks subtle motions of subatomic particles called muons has found tantalizing evidence for a vast shadow universe of normally unseen matter existing side by side with ours, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory said yesterday. The significance of the findings has been thrown into doubt by a series of mathematical errors and theoretical disagreements by physicists around the world who have been weighing the evidence for what would, if correct, rank as one of the greatest discoveries in science. The Brookhaven "g minus 2" experiment has produced extraordinarily minute observations of the gyrating muons. In a dispiriting...

Scientists tinker with displays for books, clothing, and military gadgets that are as thin as newsprint and as durable as fabric. Clothing for travelers or soldiers that alters color to fit the environment. Books that change content on request. Computer displays so thin they can be manufactured on a roll and cut to size like kitchen foil. Even paper that emits sounds or can be erased and reused thousands of times. These aren't the smart gadgets of fictional spy movies: They are applications of emerging electronic-display technologies. And some will hit the market as early as this year. Technologists hope...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Put the inventor of the light-emitting diode and the maker of the world's fastest transistor together in a research laboratory and what kinds of bright ideas might surface? One answer is a light-emitting transistor that could revolutionize the electronics industry. Professors Nick Holonyak Jr. and Milton Feng at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have uncovered a light-emitting transistor that could make the transistor the fundamental element in optoelectronics as well as in electronics. The scientists report their discovery in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters. "We have demonstrated light emission from the...

Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended. The Utah company, the SCO Group, has begun sending out a round of warning letters to large corporate users of Linux, which is distributed free. The letters, dated Friday, assert that Linux, a variant of the Unix operating system, violates an SCO license and copyright. SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, owns the rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included...

[Computerworld] IT managers are increasingly turning to thin clients, other options in push to cut PC costs EVERY YEAR Dave Raspallo, CIO at Textron Financial Corp., found himself having to replace a third of his 1,200 PCs. But he grew tired of the cost of the annual ritual, and he began swapping out his desktops for thin clients. Forty percent of those PCs are now gone, and many more will disappear next year. "I would consider it a failure if we don't eliminate completely the use of any desktops," said Raspallo, who has a name for his project: STIMI, or...

Advanced Micro Devices has quietly trotted out a version of its Athlon 64 chip that provides a little less performance than earlier models but only costs about half as much. The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman. The 3200+ features a 1MB cache. A cache is a pool of memory integrated into the processor for rapid data access. In general, large caches lead to better performance. AMD, however, prices the Athlon 64 3000+ at $218 in quantities...

MIAMI -- Herb Williams, a Palatka, Fla., dock builder and former Alaskan crab boat skipper, isn't the first guy you would peg for solving the world's energy problems. But here he sat, tropical shirt standing out at a table of button-down engineers from Miami-Dade's water and sewer plant on Virginia Key, making a plan that sounds like science fiction seem plausible. Almost inevitable. Williams' small company wants to sink a network of innovative turbines he has designed -- think of a giant fan with a hole in the center where the hub should be -- deep into the Gulf Stream...

First Report from Grokker Inside Hearing: IBM Wins Both Motions to Compel Friday, December 05 2003 @ 02:30 PM EST Our first report from a Groklaw volunteer, sam, who attended the court hearing is that IBM won both of its motions to compel and SCO's motion was set for a later date. Here is what sam is telling us, and it's subject to further information and confirmation as more news arrives. We have several attending and I'll do a followup, but this is the first word. Here is what sam is telling us: "Just returned from the hearing. "Needless to...

22nd Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & BERKELEY, Calif. – In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 22nd edition of the “TOP500” list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today (November 16, 2003). The Earth Simulator supercomputer retains the number one position with its Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). It was built by NEC and installed last year at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan. The list of cluster systems in the TOP10 has grown...

Missile Defense Boost-Phase Contract Awarded The Department of Defense announced today that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman Space and Mission Systems Corp. for the development and testing of a concept for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) program designed to intercept and destroy a ballistic missile in its boost/early ascent phase, which is the period of flight lasting from three to five minutes after a ballistic missile is launched. The contract awarded today is approximately $4.5 billion over the next eight years. This is the MDA’s first capability-based development and test contract, and it...

By MICHAEL KANELLOS Staff Writer, CNET News.com Intel said it has produced chips with the 65-nanometre manufacturing process, a strong sign the company will continue to keep pace with Moore's Law. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker announced Monday that it has made Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cells, a type of memory, with the 65-nanometre process and will start to mass-manufacture chips on the process in 2005. The nanometre figure refers to the average size of features on chips produced with the process. Most PC microprocessors on the market today are made on the 130-nanometre process, and manufacturers are just...

Korea to build 100M bps Internet system Infrastructure will offer telecom, broadcasting and Internet access from a variety of devices By David Legard, IDG News Service November 18, 2003 South Korea plans to build a nationwide Internet access infrastructure capable of speeds between 50M bps (bits per second) and 100M bps by 2010, the online edition of the Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper reported Tuesday. The infrastructure will be known as the broadband convergence network (BcN) and will offer telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet access from a wide variety of devices, the paper said, quoting the Ministry of Information and Communication. Construction...

<p>The first leg of an ultra-high-performance network will go live this week in what its backers call the most important networking experiment since Arpanet, the military network that laid the foundation for the Internet.</p> <p>The National LambdaRail is the biggest, fastest network ever undertaken for scientific research.</p>

Microsoft placed a $250,000 bounty on the respective heads of the MSBlaster and So.Big virus writers as part of a $5 million program it launched here on Wednesday with the FBI, Secret Service and Interpol to fight cybercrime. The reward program, sponsored by Microsoft and backed by those law enforcement agencies, represents the first major partnership between the private sector and government officials to hunt down, capture and prosecute hackers and virus writers.At a press conference today at the National Press Club in Washington, Microsoft's top attorney pledged to press prosecution of suspected virus writers and reward those who turn...

The nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way has been revealed. It is so close that the Milky Way is gradually consuming it by pulling in its stars. But it will be few billion years before it is entirely swallowed up. The previously unknown galaxy lies about 25,000 light years from Earth and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, beyond the stars in the constellation Canis Major. It is twice as close to the centre of our galaxy than the previous record holder, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which was discovered in 1994. Geraint Lewis, at the...

Microsoft Corp. on Monday began selling new voice recognition and control software to allow mobile phone and handheld computer users to control most functions of their phones without fiddling with tiny controls. Microsoft Voice Command will be sold as a $40 add-on for the Windows Mobile Pocket PC software for personal digital assistants and the Pocket PC version for mobile phones, the world's largest software maker said. Microsoft, trying to move its software beyond the desktop and into living rooms and mobile devices, said the new voice control software will make it easier for users to access information and functions...

The Sun cut loose with three severe flares in less than 24 hours through Monday morning, bringing to nine the number of major eruptions in less than two weeks. Scientists have never witnessed a string of activity like this. Colorful aurora are expected to grace the skies at high latitudes and possibly into lower portions of the United States and Europe over the next two or three nights. Satellites and power grids could once again be put at risk. Early Monday, Paal Brekke, deputy project manager of the SOHO spacecraft, was still digesting the significance of the three additional outbursts...