Free Republic

Remember when every house had just one television? Today, it's not uncommon for families to have multiple televisions. The personal computer is poised to experience the same phenomenon. The tipping point will be when a personal computer is cheaper than the desk it sits on. Then we'll see PCs appearing in every room of every house and employees will have more than one computer on their desk. As prices fall, PCs are moving from one per person (or per family) big-ticket items to common appliances. They're becoming commodities that can be dedicated to a task or a location. Tomorrow's teenager...

It’s hard to get site to stop spitting out personal information A section of the orders being published by Waxboxes.com. April 1 — Who’s responsible when a year-old software bug hasn’t been fixed, and as a result, customer credit card numbers are spit out onto the Internet; and when the company involved doesn’t answer e-mails or phone calls, but all the while, keeps handing credit card numbers to hackers? MSNBC.com tried to reach the site, Waxboxes.com, but with no luck. Meanwhile, the source who found the customer records tried to contact the credit card association fraud departments, and that didn’t...

Microsoft's borrowed code may pose risk By Robert Lemos Staff Writer, CNET News.com March 14, 2002, 12:05 PM PT A security flaw in open-source software used by Linux and Unix systems for compression may affect some Microsoft products that also use the code. As reported earlier this week by CNET News.com, a flaw in the zlib software-compression library could leave much of the systems based on the open-source operating system Linux open to attack. On Thursday, the researchers who discovered the flaw reported that at least nine of Microsoft's major applications--including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, DirectX, Messenger and Front Page--appear...

Sources inside AOL and Red Hat say AOL is making a major internal switch to Linux, and the long-rumored AOL default browser switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla -- or at least Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine -- is well under way, but AOL will probably not offer an AOL client for Linux in the forseeable future. According to several Red Hat and AOL employees who spoke to NewsForge but asked us not to use their names, recent negotiations between AOL and Red Hat that led to rumors about AOL considering a Red Hat acquisition were really negotiations for support...