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Apple says profits eaten away, flat sales ahead CUPERTINO, California (AFP) Jan 15, 2003 Apple Computer Inc. said Wednesday it lost money in the three months which ended December 28 and it expected flat sales ahead. Apple made a net loss of eight million dollars or two cents a share in the three months, compared to a profit of 38 million dollars or 11 cents a share in the same period a year earlier, it said. Sales rose 7.05 percent to 1.47 billion dollars. Apple said it would have made a small profit in the period, but the money was...

November 26, 2002  | Paul ThurrottMost Unsecure OS? Yep, It's Linux According to a new Aberdeen Group report, open-source solution Linux has surpassed Windows as the most vulnerable OS, contrary to the high-profile press Microsoft's security woes receive. Furthermore, the Aberdeen Group reports that more than 50 percent of all security advisories that CERT issued in the first 10 months of 2002 were for Linux and other open-source software solutions. The report muddles the argument that proprietary software such as Windows is inherently less secure than open solutions. And here's another blow to the status quo: Proprietary UNIX solutions were responsible...

Russian scientist Alexander Bolonkin develops artificial intelligence in the USA It was shown in my previous articles about the artificial intelligence and human immortality that the issue of immortality can be solved fundamentally only with the help of changing a biological bubble of a human being to an artificial one. Such an immortal person made of chips and supersolid materials (the e-man, as it was called in my articles) will have incredible advantages in comparison with common people. An e-man will need no food, no dwelling, no air, no sleep, no rest, no ecologically pure environment. Such a being...

Hordes of Apple faithful were on hand Tuesday for another of CEO Steve Jobs’ revival meetings, again disguised as the keynote address at the Macworld exposition in San Francisco. And Jobs didn’t disappoint, telling his flock of a new Web browser, an open-source presentation program plus a pair of new notebook computers, including the first one ever to have a 17-inch screen. THE BIGGEST NEWS on the software front was the announcement of two new programs which will directly compete with Microsoft software that handle similar tasks. Safari is Apple’s new turbo-charged Web browser for OS X (the current version...

Thieves who broke into a government contractor's office snatched computer hard drives containing Social Security numbers, addresses and other records of about 500,000 members of the military and their families. The company, Phoenix-based TriWest Healthcare Alliance, provides managed health care to the military in 16 states, including Minnesota. It serves about 1.1 million active-duty personnel, their dependents and retirees. TriWest spokesman Jim Kassebaum said Thursday that no one whose records were stolen has reported a fraud related to the Dec. 14 theft. ``There's a potential for identity theft,'' Kassebaum said. ``If you know anything about identity theft, it's a little...

NEW YORK (AP) -- America Online has won a court judgment for nearly $7 million in damages against what it termed a "spam ring" that bombarded AOL members with junk e-mail pitching adult Web sites. AOL said the damages awarded by the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., was the largest ever from one of its lawsuits against spammers. AOL has filed some 20 of such lawsuits over the years. "This sends a message to both members and spammers that we take spam seriously on this service," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said Tuesday. One of the defendants in the latest...

YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) -- It's a machine so fast it performs more computations per second than there are stars in our galaxy. It's so large it's housed in a building the size of an aircraft hangar. Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world, almost five times faster than the next best one and as fast as the top 5 U.S. supercomputers combined. For the Japanese scientists using the $350 million computer, it means climate research, with its complex simulations and diverse mix of variables, is more accurate than ever before. For...

YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) -- It's a machine so fast it performs more computations per second than there are stars in our galaxy. It's so large it's housed in a building the size of an aircraft hangar. Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world, almost five times faster than the next best one and as fast as the top 5 U.S. supercomputers combined. For the Japanese scientists using the $350 million computer, it means climate research, with its complex simulations and diverse mix of variables, is more accurate than ever before. For...

Apple Computer has pulled back from a plan that would have made Mac OS X the primary operating system on all new Macs starting in January. In September, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said that after the New Year, new Macs would only boot up into Mac OS X. Older models had the capability of booting into Mac OS X or the older OS 9.2. New systems would still ship with OS 9.2--to support the "Classic" mode for older software--but it could only be accessed through OS X. However, Apple said Friday that it will continue to sell schools some Macs...

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- In an effort to boost sales during the holiday shopping period, Gateway Inc. is giving away free computers to customers who purchase one of the company's high-end machines. The two-for-one deal is one of several promotions the struggling Poway-based company is offering between now and Christmas to beef up business. The company is also offering free shipping and handling on select PC purchases and is selling its PCs intended for at-home use with 2,000 songs pre-installed. Earlier this month, CEO Ted Waitt said that if Gateway does not have several strong weeks of sales in December...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 December 15 A Network of Microlensing Caustics Credit & Copyright: Joachim Wambsganss (Ap. Inst. Potsdam) Explanation: A virtual sky map like this would be of interest to astronomers studying gravitational microlensing. In microlensing, the gravity of stars near the line of sight can act to magnify the light of background objects such as distant stars, or quasars. Nowhere is this magnification greater than near a gravitational lensing...

  Senate Closes Accidental AnonymizerBy Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus Dec 10 2002 1:24PMNever let it be said that the United States Senate has done nothing for Internet privacy. Network administrators for the U.S. government site www.senate.gov shut down an open proxy server over the weekend that for months had turned the site into a free Web anonymizer that could have allowed savvy surfers to launder their Internet connections so that efforts to trace them would lead to Capitol Hill. A proxy server is normally a dedicated machine that sits between a private network and the outside world, passing internal users'...

A man charged with theft didn't have the money to pay for a rehabilitation programme that would clear his criminal record, so he stole a courthouse computer. Police say Ernesto Valdez arrived at the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to enrol in the programme. Valdez did not have the £430 enrolment fee, so he stole a court stenographer's laptop computer to pawn, according to police. The pawn shop refused to take the computer because the power cord was missing, so Valdez returned to the courthouse to retrieve it. He was arrested after a stenographer spotted him in the office...

Only in Amerika Developing the capability to build dossiers on all Americans By DOUG THOMPSON Nov 21, 2002, 07:50 As part of its expanded powers under the guise of “homeland security,” the federal government is developing interlinked databases that will track financial transactions, phone calls, Internet activity, gun ownership and even vehicle use of all Americans, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. One such database, the Orwellian-sounding Total Information Awareness System, is a Pentagon-based computer project headed by former Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter, director of the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency that originally...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 25 The Earth's Magnetic Field Credit & Copyright: Gary A. Glatzmaier (UCSC) Explanation: Why does the Earth have a magnetic field? The electrical conductivity of the molten plasma of the Earth's core should be able to damp the current magnetic field in only thousands of years. Yet our five billion year old Earth clearly causes magnets to point to (defined) north. The mystery is still being...

Porn shows up in businessman's slide show Associated Press FORT WORTH -- A North Texas businessman has been jailed after co-workers reported an image of child pornography showed up on a screen as he gave a computer slide presentation recently. James Andrew Smith of Denton was in the Mansfield Jail under $300,000 bond after he was charged with two counts of possessing child pornography and one charge of promoting child pornography. Exel Inc. co-workers told police Smith had just completed a PowerPoint presentation on Sept. 4 when he tried to open another document on his laptop computer. The co-workers said...

This was a real memo sent out by a computer company to its employees in all seriousness. It went to all field engineers about a computer peripheral problem. The author of this memo was quite genuine. The word is that the engineers literally rolled on the floor! (Especially note the last couple of sentences.) Re: Replacement of Mouse Balls. If a mouse fails to operate or should it perform erratically, it may need a ball replacement. Mouse balls are now available as FRU (Field Replacement Units). Because of the delicate nature of this procedure, replacement of mouse balls should only...

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Michael Sands CMO at Orbitz Depending upon whom you ask, Michael Sands is either a successful user of pop-under ads or an apologist for them. As the chief marketing officer for Orbitz, a Chicago-based online travel site founded by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and United Airlines in 1999, Sands has overseen pop-under ad blitzes like Orbitz's current "shear the sheep" campaign. Sands, who joined Orbitz in late 2000 after highly successful work in e-commerce and integrated marketing for Oldsmobile during the late 90s, doesn't seem rattled by the complaints of agitated web surfers. He has seen that the ads are...

A simple way to exploit an unfixed defect in Internet Explorer has been discovered that allows malicious web sites, and possibly malicious email messages read with Outlook or Outlook Express, to take control of a computer. All you would need to do is click a web link and the owner of the web site could take almost any action they desired on your computer. Simple, working exploit software was recently published to a public mailing list. There is no patch to fix the problem. Anti-virus and personal firewall software will not prevent an exploit. It is hoped that Microsoft will...