Free Republic

Last week, when I condemned the flood of crippled trial software, ads and offers that come loaded on new Windows Vista computers, readers reacted strongly. I received roughly 700 emails, all but a handful agreeing with me. The column was the most popular article that day on WSJ.com and was cited on numerous other Web sites. Clearly, many people are furious about these unwanted programs and icons, which are sometimes called craplets. Many would like to smite them without going through the laborious process of uninstalling them manually, one at a time. Some readers suggested strategies. The following are some...

India’s largest outsourcer Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has set up a global delivery center in Guadalajara, Mexico, with plans to hire up to 5,000 staff there over the next five years. Having a center in Mexico helps TCS, of Mumbai, as it will be closer to U.S. customers and on a similar time zone, said Pradipta Bagchi, a spokesman for TCS said on Thursday. The South American market also provides a significant opportunity for TCS because of a large number of regional companies investing in information technology and related services, Bagchi said. TCS currently has about 5,000 employees in South...

Requesting help from any Freeper who may know of a solution... We had a power outage overnight. When I tried to reboot this morning, my desktop didn't come up. When I select the "Restore Active Desktop" command, it fails with the error message: "Internet Explorer Script Error" and the details "An error has occurred on the script of this page" referencing Line 65, character 1, and error message: Object doesn't support this action; Code: 0. And it provides a URL followed by "Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?" with the default to "Yes". After hitting enter,...

ATLANTA - The lesson plan was called "Artificial Unintelligence," but it was written more like a comic book than a syllabus for a serious computer science class. "Singing, dancing and drawing polygons may be nifty, but any self-respecting evil roboticist needs a few more tricks in the repertoire if they are going to take over the world," read the day's instructions to a dozen or so Georgia Tech robotics students. They had spent the last few months teaching their personal "Scribbler" robots to draw shapes and chirp on command. Now they were being asked to navigate a daunting obstacle course...

A timeline: A Windows update icon shows up on the bottom of the computer screen to show that a new update is available. It is the patch so that hackers don't use Windows updates to piggy-back onto the computer. Try to download and install patch. The icon shows up repeatedly for several days, even though it states that it has been downloaded. A BBC article about malware using a trojan to piggy-back on Windows update is put on the BBC site. Mentions the patch. Download and install Avast anti-virus. Next day, put in registration key for Avast. Later, the Avast...

China pirates less softwareInTech News, 17 May 2007 The software piracy rate in China is down for the third consecutive year. That’s the good news. The bad news is about 82% of the software the Chinese use is illegal. The Wall Street Journal reported piracy has been declining for three years, according to new estimates from an industry group, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in new business in the world's second largest personal-computer market by unit sales. Software piracy is still high by international standards: The study, conducted by research firm International Data Corp. for the Business Software Alliance,...

Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers....

A large retail chain had a problem. It sold three similar power drills: one for about $90, a purportedly better one at $120 and a top-tier one at $130. The higher the price, the more the store profited. But while drill know-it-alls flocked to the $130 model and price-fretters grabbed its $90 cousin, shoppers often ignored the middle one. So the store sought advice from a new breed of "price-optimization" software from DemandTec Inc. What followed offers us a clue about important shifts that technology is bringing to retail shopping. After analyzing an array of variables, including sales history and...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement from 10 other countries conducted over 90 searches worldwide as part of "Operation Site Down," designed to disrupt and dismantle many of the leading criminal organizations that illegally distribute and trade in copyrighted software, movies, music, and games on the Internet. Operation Site Down is the culmination of three separate undercover investigations conducted by the FBI. In the past 24 hours, more than 70 searches were executed in the United States, and more than 20 overseas. Four individuals were arrested in the United States, and searches and/or arrests occurred in the following...

NEW DELHI - 100,000. That's the number of new jobs that India's top five software companies plan to add this fiscal year, riding a boom in outsourcing that's fattened profits. That's on top of a record 76,500 new employees who joined these companies last year. The figures underscore how rapidly U.S. and other Western companies are shifting work to low-cost India, where outsourcing is no longer limited to call centers or back office work such as billing and salary records. Companies like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and Infosys Technologies Ltd. now have thousands of engineers developing software to improve corporate...

California continues to employ far more technology workers, pay higher wages and attract more venture capital than any other state. But the overall U.S. tech sector is also growing at a surprisingly brisk clip - for now. That's the conclusion of a highly anticipated annual report by AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association, the country's largest technology trade association. Researchers relied on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, mostly from 2006. According to the 2007 "Cyberstates" report, to be published Tuesday, the U.S. tech industry employed 5.8 million people last year - up 2.6 percent from 2005. The...

Look like EMC has VMware's upcoming IPO penciled in for late June and that the S1 registration papers should start circulating soon. EMC said in February that it would float 10% of the subsidiary, which could be valued at $10 billion.

Are you sick of bland, pathetic-looking posters made with colored markers? Are you graphically challenged and not very software savvy? Do you wish your FReeps had professional, cheap posters that catch the eye? Today, after looking for months, I finally found an amazing poster software called PosteRazor. It is free, and works with Windows or Mac OSs. You will not believe how easy it is to use. It takes your image, and cuts it into tiles, then quickly converts them into PDF pages, which you can print on paper of your choosing and assemble into a large poster or banner....

To honor an employee's son who was badly wounded in Iraq, IBM Corp. plans to give the U.S. military $45 million worth of Arabic-English translation technology that the Pentagon had been testing for possible purchase. The offer - made from the highest reaches of the company directly to President Bush - is so unusual that Defense Department and IBM lawyers have been scouring federal laws to make sure the government can accept the donation.

Open Source != Communism > If we agreed on everything there would be no debate :) No need to oppose for the hell of it though > You did not provide a commercial/business answer to > who is going to continue funding the development of > free software, we all have to pay bills. Actually I did. I said that virtually all the Linux Kernel update code over the last few years has been supplied by paid for developers from the likes of Red Hat, Suse, IBM etc. This is quite common. I have seen several surveys that confirm that...

Shadow chancellor George Osbourne has estimated that the UK government could save in excess of £600 million a year if more open source software was deployed across various departments. He added that the need of the hour was a "culture change" as open source software could cut the IT bill by as much as 5 percent every year. "The problem is that the cultural change has not taken place in government," he said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts yesterday. Mr Osbourne added that the government had chosen to neglect a 2004 report that said savings would...

Down To Business: Talent Shortage ? Employers Must Take Some Of The Rap Many tech pros are demoralized, thanks to knee-jerk offshore outsourcing and the post-bubble malaise. Employers must move beyond the "you should be happy you have a job" mentality. By Rob Preston InformationWeek March 3, 2007 12:00 AM (From the March 5, 2007 issue) Ask a dozen CIOs and tech vendor CEOs to identify their single most pressing challenge, and you'll likely get at least 10 different answers, right? Not exactly. In fact, they all come back to one overarching concern: finding, grooming, and retaining tomorrow's leaders. I...

I run Windows 98 (I hate change), and I've had AVG from Grisoft since 1998 ... a free anti virus that is no longer supported for Win98.Is there another freeware antivirus program anyone will recommend?Thanx.Yes, I'm logged in and I'm watching my sister and a moose eat cheeze in the shower ... stuning!

Oracle announced a deal today to acquire Hyperion Solutions, which makes software that allows corporations to analyze and track their performance, for about $3.3 billion. The deal is the latest trophy in a long string of acquisitions by Oracle, the database software giant that has been struggling to grow from within. In December, Oracle posted strong earnings growth for its second fiscal quarter, but its growth in license sales disappointed investors. The company said at the time that it had failed to close some crucial licensing deals during the quarter. License sales rose 28 percent in the quarter, but that...

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel. The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm. The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it. The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously. Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight...