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I tried, I really did, to like KDE 4.2 I really didn't like the early versions of KDE 4. I then tried KDE 4.1. I hated it. I kept getting told by people that I just didn't get it. OK, I thought. Maybe I didn't get it. So, I gave the last KDE 4.2 beta and release candidate another try for a month on one of my openSUSE 11.1 desktops. Historically, SUSE and KDE developers work closely with each other, so openSUSE is a great distribution for any version of KDE. Well, they may work well together, but openSUSE with...

...the Santa Clara, Calif., company is hoping for another coup like the one it staged at Apple, where Nvidia bumped Intel silicon out of the Apple MacBook because of underperforming graphics. The goal this time is to replace the Intel silicon that supports the Atom processor. Currently, Netbooks from companies such as Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell use the Atom and accompanying Intel silicon called a chipset. Nvidia has always stayed well ahead of Intel on the graphics performance curve... said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a firm that tracks the graphics chip market. "First, because Nvidia is in...

Security watchers are bracing themselves to respond to the activitation of the huge botnet created by the Conficker superworm. The malware has created a network of infected PCs under its control estimated at 9m or even more, according to the latest estimates — dwarfing the zombie army created by the infamous Storm worm, which reached a comparatively paltry 1m at its peak in September 2007. Variants of Conficker (aka Downadup), which began circulating in late November, exploit the MS08-067 vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows server service addressed by Redmond with an out-of-sequence patch last October. The malware also infects removable...

Due to Microsoft's Vista Capable marketing program, the company could stand to lose as much as $8.5 billion in efforts to settle accounts with those customers affected by the campaign. However, this figure is a drop in the bucket compared to the potentially $100 billion Microsoft has taken in revenue thus far for Vista.Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman released figures from the class-action lawsuit that claims Microsoft mislead its customers in the months before the January 2007 release of their Vista operating system. Microsoft has said that the estimate is inflated, and that if damages were granted it...

Eighth grader Charlie Sobcov wants to stop birds from dying in collisions with windows, but he doesn't want to ruin anybody's view. For his latest school science fair project he has invented painted, plastic decals that can be placed — discreetly — right in the middle of a window pane. "This paint is a colour that birds can see but humans can't," he said Wednesday on CBC Radio's All in a Day. "It's like putting a big stop sign in the middle of the window." The colour is ultraviolet, beyond the range of colours visible to humans. That means the...

SAN FRANCISCO – A nasty worm has wriggled into millions of computers and continues to spread, leaving security experts wondering whether the attack is a harbinger of evil deeds to come. US software protection firm F-Secure says a computer worm known as "Conficker" or "Downadup" had infected more than nine million computers by Tuesday and was spreading at a rate of one million machines daily. The malicious software had yet to do any noticeable damage, prompting debate as to whether it is impotent, waiting to detonate, or a test run by cybercriminals intent on profiting from the weakness in the...

I have an old PC with a Pentium 1 it is ok for email etc.. I thought it might run faster with LINUX

The Conficker virus has opened a new can of worms for security experts. Drives such as USB sticks infected with the virus trick users into installing the worm, according to researchers. The "Autoplay" function in Vista and early versions of Windows 7 automatically searches for programs on removable drives.

Microsoft servers got quite a workout on Friday from potential testers as the company opened public beta testing of Windows 7 to a broad audience– so much so, in fact, that the company decided to delay the beta's opening until it can bring more servers online. "Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta," said a posting on The Windows Blog at around 3 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday afternoon. It included a promise...

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with an impassioned endorsement of PCs and a sneak peek at the company's future Windows 7 operating system. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Windows 7 will make PCs easier to use. As expected, Ballmer announced that Microsoft is releasing a beta version of Windows 7, which will be available for download beginning Friday. The news suggests the world's largest software maker may be giving up efforts to rehabilitate its often-maligned Vista operating system, which was released worldwide in January 2007. "We...

Microsoft Corp.'s next version of the Windows operating system is almost ready for prime time. That's one message Chief Executive Steve Ballmer delivered on the eve of the official opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show. The world's largest software maker also disclosed deals to make its Live Search programs the default search engines on more personal computers and mobile phones. And it announced a new version of its Ford Sync in-car technology that folds in the voice-operated directory service TellMe, which Microsoft bought in 2007. For years, the opening keynote at CES belonged to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, whose...

Taking baby steps to become more familiar with a new operating system can be as simple as revamping the OS already in use on your computer. It begins with unlearning Windows-born behavior to free up your mind for a new way of doing things. Here are some tips on utilizing different open source resources to make the goal of a full time switch over to Linux a lasting one: Relearning software installation with Win-Get For Windows users, software installation is nearly always accomplished from some sort of simple GUI installer. The idea is basically to keep pounding away on the...

nandemoari writes "It seems not even Microsoft is impervious to the effects of this increasingly painful recession. According to reports, the Redmond-based company is preparing to lay off about 17 per cent of its entire workforce in the coming months. Despite its portfolio diversity — including operating systems, antivirus software, and video game consoles — Microsoft is clearly feeling the pressure applied by a tightening global economy. In fact, there seems to be a sense of emergency to the massive cuts (about 15,000 workers out of 90,000), which rumors suggest should be made official by January 15."

SHANGHAI — A court in southern China convicted 11 people on Wednesday of violating national copyright laws and participating in a sophisticated counterfeiting ring that for years manufactured and distributed pirated Microsoft software throughout the world. The men were sentenced by a court in the city of Shenzhen to terms of 18 months to six and a half years in prison, according to court papers released late Wednesday. Microsoft applauded the sentence in a statement released late Wednesday Beijing time, saying they were the stiffest sentences ever handed down in this type of Chinese copyright infringement case. Microsoft has called...

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is extending the deadline for making its supposedly retired Windows XP operating system available to custom PC builders. Under the plan, system builders will be allowed to take delivery of XP licenses and media through May 30. Previously, Microsoft had announced a Jan. 31 XP cutoff date for system builders, which are typically smaller, build-to-order vendors. The news was first reported Friday by InformationWeek.com sister site ChannelWeb.

Windows users have a real problem when it comes to updates. Sure they have Microsoft Update and certainly many applications include their own update mechanisms. Yet despite that, there seems to be a problem with Windows users actually updating. So allow me to make a suggestion. Microsoft (or a really smart ISV) should build a full application manager for Windows, similar to what most Linux distributions do today. For the non-Linux users out there - what Linux distros typically do is have a package management utility of some sort that pulls updates from a package repository (or repositories). Those updates...

Posted in The Bleeding Obvious, The Iron Coccyx of the Law | No Comments » Windows 7 Beta Invitations Sent Out, RSVP by Text Message, Instant Message, Email, YouTube, Twitter, or Cell Posted by Anthony Sacramone on December 17, 2008 010So the great “Vista Do Over” of 2009 is upon us. Will it increase speed, compatability, manageability, security, and connectability? Or will it be a hulking overstuffed lumbering piece of digital doggie doo? And how many versions will there be? One-Step-Above-DOS Useless, Basic, Home, Business, Premium, Ultimate, Triple No-Backsies Ultimate, Oh My Heavenly Lord This Thing Weighs a Ton Drop-Dead...

SAN FRANCISCO — Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it. Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect its Windows operating system, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware surreptitiously takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread more malware to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of the onslaught.

Bill Gates: I'd Work in Obama Administration Microsoft founder Bill Gates has met with Vice President-elect Joe Biden and said he's open to a role aiding the incoming Barack Obama administration. Gates is in Washington this week to promote the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's education and global health agenda. "Certainly my full-time job is being chairman of the foundation," he told The Washington Post. But he added: "If there was some committee or pretty focused task where I could contribute, I'd be glad to consider that, and I hope that the things we've learned about education, including the mistakes...

Apple has replaced advice that people install anti-virus software on Macintosh computers with assurances that the machines are safe "out of the box." The move prompted online speculation as to whether Apple was merely polishing the Macintosh image or that the increasingly popular computers are as impervious to hackers as the California company maintains. Apple routinely touts how rarely Macintosh computers are afflicted with malicious software as compared to machines based on Microsoft Windows operating systems, which run more than 90 percent of the computers in the world. On Tuesday Apple removed a 2007 Knowledge Base posting telling people to...

OK... I will make this as brief as I can: My Step-Father is a Real Estate agent just outside of Houston, TX (Tomball and the Woodlands area). He uses Windows XP, and has a history of computer troubles, mostly related to scripts and worms that for some reason every Anti-Virus he has ever used just won't seem to keep out. I have jokingly told him to buy a Macintosh next time around... but he has held to his Realtor-related business requires Windows. Fine... Well, about every two weeks, his Internet Explorer (latest version) will not work at all - it...

Los Angeles: Barack Obama has promised to increase taxes if he becomes president of the United States. But the really rich want change and many of them have said they are voting for the senator from Illinois. Despite the tradition that says the country's wealthy tend to favour the Republican Party, there has been an unexpected swing ahead of Tuesday's election that favours the black Democratic candidate. For starters, the country's two richest men, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have already said they will vote for Obama. According to Forbes magazine, Gates - worth an estimated $55.5 billion - contributed...

This is a bit lengthy, so please bear with me. Damn, but I did something stupid and downloaded something I shouldnt have (no, not porn. get your mind out of the gutter :-)). When I downloaded this virus, the cmd screen came up and showed the following: crack.exe, serial.exe, number.exe, keygen.exe AND readme.bat I panicked, deleted those things, but it hasnt fixed my problem. It seems to have hijacked my internet explorer browser. When I clicked on the IE icon, it brought up the IE browser for all of a second or two before closing. (So, I used Firefox to...

My initial evaluation of Windows 7 shows that it's really just Vista with a fresh coat of paint I have seen the future, and it is bleak. Windows 7, the next big version, the one that was supposed to fix everything that was wrong with Vista, is here (at least in pre-beta form), and I can now say -- with some confidence -- that Microsoft has once again dropped the ball. Based on what I saw in today's keynote speech, and on what I discovered while testing the Windows 7 M3 build during some down time this afternoon, Windows 7...

President Bush gets a lot of grief over the economic woes that have occurred under his watch, but now people can thank him for something spiffy: Free software. It comes courtesy of the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge. In July, St. Paul software developer CodeWeavers came up with the gimmick to make its products available free for a day if any one of five positive (but seemingly unlikely at the time) things happened during Bush's last six months in office: gas drops to $2.79 a gallon, milk drops to $3.50 a gallon, U.S. jobs exceed 138 million, the Twin...

Finally the iPhone unleashed! Break away from the stranglehold Jobs & Co. have on you and your iPhone. Download and install the software you've really been wanting to use. Never again suffer from "windows" envy or be ridiculed for having a small software repository. Upgrade NOW to the NEW, Dual Boot Windows iPhone Mobile...Coming in Jan. 09.

To avoid having to spend 11 hours deploying each Windows machine with all the requisite software, I have taken a finished Windows XP machine, made a bit perfect copy of it's hard drive, and copied it to the hard drive of a hardware-identical machine. Both machines have OEM licenses of Windows XP. Total time of deployment of subsequent machines: 60 minutes. Time saved: 10 hours per machine

The carefully crafted ecosystem of tech companies built around Microsoft's Windows operating system is showing signs of strain. Hewlett-Packard, a longtime Microsoft ally, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that would make Windows Vista easier to use, or bypass some of its more onerous features. A Skunk Works of engineers at the company is even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, sources say.

Anyone see the new Microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? Is that a piece o work or what??? Methinks Bill oughta give up his closet hopes of being a big media star and at least attempt to bring us a reliable, secure OS.

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS). Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG. The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games. Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected. Orbital outbreak Space news website SpaceRef broke the story about the virus on the laptops that astronauts took to the ISS....

Excerpt - Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld. The software giant's new $300 million advertising campaign, devised by a newly hired ad agency, has been closely guarded. But Mr. Seinfeld will be one of the key celebrity pitchmen, say people close to the situation. He will appear with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in ads and receive about $10 million for the work, they say. ~ snip ~

Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird's Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting Well this is just perfect. At the exact moment Li Ning was rounding the lip of the Bird's Nest during the amazing torch-lighting climax, someone snapped this photo of our good friend the BSOD nestled amongst the Nest's steel twigs. Perhaps an Opening Cermonies IT dude spit out his coffee on the machines in the server room when Li took to the sky? Another question is what a projection screen is doing inside the Nest at that location, but I think the better question is what wasn't going...

See comments below.

It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries. Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new. The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass? “They’re the thickest and gooiest of...

 « View all web results for SiteMeter Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet ExplorerWired News - 2 hours ago By Kim Zetter August 02, 2008 | 4:23:19 AMCategories: Glitches and Bugs A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of ... Attention Sitemeter Users: Your Site is DownMashable, CA - 3 hours ago Because they use SiteMeter, a popular free traffic metrics utility. As of this moment, there hasn’t been any official statement from SiteMeter via their ... SiteMeter causing blogs and websites to crash in Microsoft's ...Northwest Progressive Institute Official Blog, WA - 7 hours ago...

Many have said they’re not interested in Windows Vista, that Windows XP is just fine for them. And in fact, you could go so far as to say some of them actually hate the OS. Still, a new OS, Mojave, may just be the key to a new marketing campaign. Last week Microsoft told a focus group in San Francisco they were being shown a new version of Windows, codenamed Mojave. Feedback was quite positive; more than 90% gave positive feedback. Afterwards they were told that Mojave was actually Windows Vista.

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology. Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64, ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process. According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of...

Some of the coolest OS features are nowhere to be found in Windows XP or Vista. Here are 18 brilliant features that Microsoft should beg for, borrow, or steal--plus tips on how you can add many of them to your PC now. Love it or hate it, Microsoft Windows is the world's most dominant operating system. But when you look at some of the hot features found in competitors such as Linux and Mac OS X, both XP and Vista can seem a little incomplete. From intuitive interface features like Apple's application dock and Cover Flow to basic media capabilities...

Found a cool, free program today that gives you Aero-style 3-D windows in XP, without the Vista hassle. It seems to work pretty well so far, though not if you're extending your desktop across multiple monitors.

July 24th, 2016.Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim milk and mocha is already waiting for him, thanks to his new Korean-made LG RoboCafe, which brews and extracts a perfect crema every time using pre-portioned, mess-free nitrogen-sealed pods imported from Brazil. He considers nudging his wife, Mindy, to get up and make him breakfast,...

When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you're pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true. So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it. As expected, everything on this 2.4GHz...

You may never think of hospitals quite the same way again, but it turns out that quite a lot of patient-care medical equipment sold these days is based on Windows. And this Windows-based equipment, whether it be cancer-care, EKG or ultrasound machines, is prone to getting hit by computer worms and viruses like any other Microsoft-based machine sitting on a corporate LAN.Hospital IT administrators want to ensure this equipment is kept up to date on security software patches in order to prevent infestation by worms that may invade hospital LANs. But as our story on this describes, patching medical devices...

Windows Vista, the OS that everyone loves to hate. Despite its enhanced security, improved CPU scheduler and excellent stability, it’s still the flawed gem in many critics’ eyes. But can Microsoft win back the XP crowd with its upcoming Windows 7 offering? The fact is, they have to. Being that gadget zone is still a fan of the Redmond, Washington, company (although we like Apple too), gadget zone contributor and computer expert, Vito Cassisi, has come up with the 20 Microsoft must do's to ensure the success of Windows 7.

A software update for the Windows operating system has left hundreds and thousands of computer users unable to access the internet. The update, known as a "patch", conflicts with another piece of software, the Zone Alarms firewall, that many people use to protect their computers from hackers and viruses. The patch, codenamed MS08-037, was designed to fix a security loophole in the way Windows handles website addresses. It was discovered that there was a weakness with the operating system that could allow hackers to re-route legitimate web pages to malicious websites instead, and leave internet users open to fraud...

In my little house we have an HP desktop and an ARCHOS 605 wifi (amongh other things) and for the longest time they worked perfectly together. Then one day they were no longer on speaking terms. Though each by itself worked out-- and checked out-- AOK. So, after some very careful investigation -- and a $$ an hour computer guy -- the problem almost certainly is a virus, or what have you. So, can anyone recommand a good de-bugging program? We just have the plain-vanilla AOL virus protection (quit snickering) and so...well...any recommandations? Thanks

Excerpt - Redmond, WA (AHN) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is pulling the XP operating system from its product line come Monday. The move comes 18 months after the company launched the Vista operating system. Although Microsoft will not sell the XP program any longer, they will still generate revenue from providing support for the software as it will no longer be free. Microsoft will offer extended support packages for XP until at least 2014. ~ snip ~

Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista By Steve Lohr Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said. The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire...

"For the opening piece in our series on Gates leaving daily life at Microsoft, one goal was to give a clear picture of the Microsoft co-founder's role inside the company, as a gauge of the impact his departure will have," Todd Bishop writes for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Microsoft Blog. "As part of that, I went back through the internal e-mails turned over in the antitrust suits against the company, looking for new insights into his personality." Bishop found a doozy, which also happens to illustrate perfectly why Mac users have such disdain for the "Windows experience." If you've ever...

Microsoft has given another lease of life to Windows XP only days before PC makers have to stop selling it. Windows XP reaches its end of life on 30 June but Microsoft has now said it can continue being sold until June 2010 but only on cheap desktops. The decision follows one made in April to extend the life of XP on low cost laptops until the same date. It comes as Dell, HP and Lenovo exploit loopholes in Microsoft's licensing terms to keep putting XP on machines. Growing market In an announcement at the Computex trade show in...

Excerpt - Switching gears. Walt asks about Vista and the lousy reception it’s been given. Is Vista a failure? Ballmer: Vista is not a failure. Is it something we’d like to improve? Of course. Is it something that with 20/20 hindsight we’d do differently? Sure, he confesses. But Vista has sold a lot of copies, he adds. Walt jumps in and asks about the percentage of Vista sales that result in downgrades to XP. Ballmer dodges. Gates looking a little depressed. Walt asks if Vista has damaged with Windows brand. Gates says Microsoft’s philosophy is to “do things better.” And...