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Why Male Leaders Cannot Have a Female Secretary?Sichuan Province in southwest China has recently formulated a new regulation forbidding male leaders to employ female secretaries, which has sparked heated discussions in various newspapers. An article in Nanfang Metropolitan Daily says the new regulation has significant meaning and can be taken as a reference by other local governments. The author of the article believes there are a few disadvantages of male leaders and female secretaries working together. In today's China, quite a few corruption cases are blamed to have been connected with female secretaries who've won the favour of their...

Re-defining the desktop paradigm By Adamson Rust: Friday 18 July 2003, 08:02 THERE'S A FUN interview with the Apple hierarchy over at Digital Video Editing. After telling interviewee Charlie White all about Mac OSX and the G5, they're challenged about the statement that Apple has released the "first 64-bit desktop". Charlie makes the Apple marketeers splutter when he mentions that BOXX shipped a dual processor 64-bit desktop on June 4th. At first they try and tough it out, but then try and redefine the meaning of desktop. Nor do the Apple folk seem aware that the Opteron is a 64-bit...

<p>Microsoft Corp. acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software, the first such design flaw to affect its latest Windows Server 2003 software.</p> <p>Microsoft said the vulnerability could allow hackers to seize control of a victim's Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails. The company urged customers to immediately apply a free software repairing patch available from Microsoft's Web site.</p>

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean man angry with his daughter's Web surfing faced possible charges on Monday after he threw a computer monitor out of his 12th-floor apartment, hitting a four-year-old girl below on the head, police said. A police official said the man, 49-year-old Park Yong-ju, had got angry when he returned to his flat in Seoul on Saturday. His 20-year-old daughter was playing an online computer game and failed to greet him, as Korean custom requires. When she declined to let him join the game, he grabbed the monitor and flung it through the balcony window, the...

Microsoft is considering paying its shareholders a special dividend of more than $10bn to reduce its $46bn cash pile. Shareholders would receive the dividend in a one payment of "significantly more than $10bn" or spread over three or four quarters, according to a person close to the discussions. The dividend, which would be the largest corporate pay-out ever, is one of a number options Microsoft is looking at, the FT's sister paper, Les Echos, has learned. The other options include a buyback, acquisitions and higher ordinary dividends. A decision is expected by the end of the year. The software giant...

We've seen some bizarre PC case modifications in our time, but this one takes the cake. One Russ Caslis has build a PC into the Millennium Falcon. Yes, Han Solo's famous smuggling vessel - 'You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?' 'Should I have?' 'It's the ship the made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs...' - now comes equipped with 7GB of hard disk storage, USB ports, PS/2 ports, network adaptor, 800MHz Via C3 processor, 256MB of 133MHz SDRAM memory and the works. Alas there's no CD or floppy, but who needs diskettes when you're outrunning Imperial cruisers?...

Empty jargon is put to the sword by new program Political speeches and corporate reports may never be the same again. A computer program that sifts the bull from business jargon and exposes politicians' empty rhetoric has been developed by management consultants. Called Bullfighter, the jargon buster was developed by Deloitte Consulting after it noticed that Enron's documents became more indecipherable as it slid further towards bankruptcy. Brian Fugere, a partner at Deloitte Consulting, said the firm came up with Bullfighter because "we've had it with repurposable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leveragable mindshare". In testing Bullfighter, Mr Fugere said,...

Inca may have used knot computer code to bind empire By Steve Connor, Science Editor 23 June 2003 They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, founded in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532. But a leading...

The mysterious trojan horse that's been making security experts scratch their heads now has a name as more details of the oddball malware were made available. The trojan horse that has been causing confusion and concern among security researchers for over a month now has been dubbed 'Stumbler' by experts at Internet Security Systems (ISS). As reported earlier, Stumbler embeds itself in Unix systems and seems to be part of a concerted effort to map Internet-connected networks using port scanning techniques. A copy of the trojan was finally captured Wednesday, and investigation of its code began Thursday. After additional analysis,...

This computer is making a grinding noise; it sounds like it might be the fan. I have the cover off and it really sounds like the fan in the back is about to go out. Will it hurt the computer if I leave it on as long as it's turning? The computer is an HP Pavillion 6535, about 3 or 4 years old... Can it be fixed at home if I go buy a new fan, or is this a do-it-yourself project that blondes should avoid? I added some RAM to it a few months ago with no problem. And...

<p>The .zip compression format has known remarkable stability and compatibility for many years, but that may soon change. PKWare and WinZip, makers of competing compression and encryption products, are fighting over the .zip standard--which means that .zip archive files created by one program may not be accessible by the other.</p>

<p>NEW YORK — A new computer virus that offers hackers full control of infected PCs, giving them access to critical information such as passwords and credit-card numbers, was spreading on the Internet Thursday.</p> <p>The virus, dubbed "BugBear.B" by virus experts, follows two other quickly spreading e-mail viruses seen in recent weeks — "Sobig.B" and "Sobig.C" — but far exceeds them in its ability to do harm and in the aggressiveness of its spread.</p>

Ex-Stokes manager had computer full of porn Finding led officials to fire him, not accept resignation By Sherry Wilson Youngquist JOURNAL REPORTER DANBURY The former county manager for Stokes County, Craig Greer, had downloaded so much Internet pornography that his computer hard drive at the government center was running out of space, county officials say. The cache of more than 27,000 photos - with such titles as 'Bye bye bikinis,' 'Housewife,' and 'Midget peep show' - was discovered by information-technology workers after Greer resigned April 28. County commissioners said yesterday that the discovery was behind their decision last week to...

<p>IBM is expected to unveil today its next-generation mainframe computer, a more powerful version of the system that once generated at least 80 percent of its profits.</p> <p>Even though IBM has become more of a services company in recent years, the mainframe is still a key product for the world's largest computer maker. Despite IBM's code-name for the product -- T-Rex, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the constant dismissal by competitors that the mainframe is a dinosaur -- the mainframe is far from death's door.</p>

<p>May 12, 2003 -- A Brooklyn woman stabbed her hubby to death early yesterday after he complained about her figure and how long she spent using the computer, cops said.</p> <p>Judy Thomas, 27, was in the bedroom of the pair's basement apartment on Hemlock Street in Cypress Hills around 1 a.m. when her husband, Jackson Thomas, berated her about the amount of time she spent on the computer, investigators said.</p>

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Security guards smashed their way into an official limousine with sledgehammers on Monday to rescue Thailand's finance minister after his car's computer failed. Suchart Jaovisidha and his driver were trapped inside the BMW for more than 10 minutes before guards broke a window. All doors and windows had locked automatically when the computer crashed, and the air-conditioning stopped, officials said. 'We could hardly breathe for over 10 minutes,' Suchart told reporters. 'It took my guard a long time to realize that we really wanted the window smashed so that we could crawl out. It was a harrowing...

Computer error to blame for rapid fall of Soyuz By Marcia Dunn in Star City, Russia 07 May 2003 A computer error is suspected of plunging the three spacemen who returned to Earth on Sunday into a descent that was so steep their tongues rolled back in their mouths and they could hardly breathe. Their Soyuz spacecraft landed in Kazakhstan, 270 miles from its intended destination. The two US astronauts and one cosmonaut were returning after five months on board the International Space Station. The landing was the first since the Columbia space shuttle disaster in February. One of the...

I am having MAJOR problems....for starters, I am accustomed to usign Netzero ISP (used it when I lived in St. Louis, MO), but now that I am in Toronto, CA my fiancee has AOL....I have no problem dialing into AOL up here ("AOL Canada"), but when I open Internet Explorer (in another window) I am not able to pull up my Hotmail account and my www.50megs.com (free) website where I regularly post articles (to friends and family) that I find on Free Republic (I have converted a LOT of people to Free Republic this way!). It has been my experience...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -The volume of junk e-mail has reached a critical threshold that requires swift action to protect the Internet correspondence millions of people take for granted, regulators said today at the end of a three-day forum on ``spam.''</p> <p>Harrington said that was the impression left by the dozens of technology experts, government officials, industry executives and lawyers who flocked to Washington to discuss the problem of unwanted commercial e-mail and what to do about it.</p>

Help, fellow Freepers! Here's my problem. I run Win 2000 Pro and IE 6, and had a trojan-caused crash. I ran Norton AV, and everything is OK, except for what happened when I did a clean install of Win2000. On bootup, I now have two choices: the old desktop, and the new desktop. Fine, no problem. I just have two parallel universes on my computer! When I reinstalled IE6, all my old folders, inbox messages, sent messages, and my fancy subfolders (all .DBX files) I use for work did not migrate over. I can't even open them up in the...