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[NOTE date of article, Feb 20, 2008] Responding to reports of endlessly rebooting PCs that flooded support newsgroups last week, Microsoft said on Tuesday it had pulled an update designed to prep Windows Vista for Service Pack 1. Although the update -- actually a pair of prerequisite files that modify Vista's install components -- has been temporarily pulled from Windows Update, Microsoft has not yet produced a fix for users whose machines either won't boot or reboot constantly. "Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further...

Union claims Starbucks win August 31, 2006 A union claiming to represent Starbucks Corp. workers at a handful of coffeehouses said Wednesday that employees of the Logan Square store have declared their membership, becoming the first outside New York City to do so. The baristas at the Logan Square Starbucks, 2759 W. Logan Blvd., joined the IWW Starbucks Workers Union on Tuesday night, the union said. They issued a set of demands that included a living wage, guaranteed work hours and the reinstatement of IWW baristas fired for organizing activity. Starbucks, the world's largest specialty coffee maker, often is lauded...

Starbucks says it was hoping to inspire old-fashioned coffee-house conversations when it introduced a campaign this year featuring the words of notable Americans on its coffee cups. But at least a few of those words are sparking more discord than discussion. A national Christian women's organization is accusing the Seattle-based coffee maker of promoting a homosexual agenda because of a quote by author Armistead Maupin, whose "Tales of the City" chronicled San Francisco's homosexual community in the 1970s and 1980s. Maupin's quote — one of several dozen in "The Way I See It" promotion — says his only regret about...

Saturday September 20, 2003 - [ 08:08 AM GMT ] Topic - Business - by Jeff Childers - Corporate IT budgets have become paralyzed by their resistance to monolithic, all-or-nothing upgrades accompanied by painful services interruptions and unexpected cost overruns. Their obstinacy has been learned by hard experience, and is caused by the near ubiquitous use of Microsoft software in business. Microsoft has engineered its software to create just this interdependency. The result is the phenomenon of "cascading" upgrades, where the decision to upgrade a single Microsoft component triggers an avalanche of related upgrade requirements. Consider the following example: A...

Using several new technologies and more than 1,000 dual-processor Power Mac G5 computers, Virginia Tech University is building a supercomputer cluster that is likely to rank among the fastest in the world.In addition to the G5 machines, the university said it is using a beta version of the latest release of OS X, new networking hardware from Mellanox and Cisco, and cutting-edge configuration and cooling technologies to build the powerful cluster for a fraction of the price of a traditional supercomputer."The total price tag is probably a factor of 10 lower than a machine in this class in the past,"...