Free Republic

Who’s funnier—Siri or Cortana? It may be a contest you’ll never be able to judge as your allegiance lies with Mac. But by installing Parallels PC on that Mac of yours, you can run most Windows apps, setting the stage for a voice assistant joke-off. If you’re a tried and true Mac user, from your iPhone to your MacBook, from your iPad to your Apple Watch, we know that switching operating systems is not likely in your cards. But it does seem that there are some applications that just run better, or are only available using Windows. Popular programs such...

Linux is all grown up. It has nothing left to prove. There's never been a year of the Linux desktop and there probably never will be, but it runs on the majority of the world's servers. It never took over the desktop, it did an end-run around it: there are more Linux-based client devices accessing those servers than there are Windows boxes.Linux Foundation boss Jim Zemlin puts it this way: "It's in literally billions of devices. Linux is the native development platform for every SOC. Freescale, Qualcomm, Intel, MIPS: Linux is the immediate choice. It's the de facto platform. It's...

Venom (Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation), the recently discovered security hole in the open-source QEMU virtual machine hypervisor, has been fixed.That's the good news. The bad news is many of you, even though you may use a QEMU-based hypervisor on your server or for your cloud, think you've nothing to worry about. You do. Venom, as described by its discoverer, Crowdstrike, an end-point security company, works by attacking QEMU's virtual Floppy Disk Controller (FDC). The first thing many of you think when learning this is: "Who cares, I've never used a floppy drive on my virtual machine (VM)!" Ah, but,...

STUDENTS COMPLAIN ABOUT EXPLICIT 'SEX CLASSES' AT PROVIDENCE   The Cowl, a student newspaper at Providence College (RI), has published a detailed report on three sociology courses known on campus as the "sex classes."  (The report is online athttp://www.thecowl.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=407037 .)    Students complain the courses--titled Modern Society, Sociology of the Family and Sociology of Human Fertility, all taught by Assistant Professor of Sociology James Moorhead--include explicit and offensive discussion of sexual issues that runs contrary to Catholic teaching, according to The Cowl.  Students claim class participants have been urged to discuss and advise each other on sexual experiences. The Cowl...

A brace of Microsoft security vulns pose risks for both home users and corporates. The more serious problem, involving Microsoft's virtual machine (Microsoft VM), which enables Java programs to run on Microsoft Windows, provides a mechanism for attackers to run amok on Windows PCs. Microsoft has released a fix designed to address the problem, which affects users of Windows 98, NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Windows Me. Attacks including "changing data, loading and running programs, and reformatting the hard disk", might be possible, according to the low-fat version of Microsoft's alert. Well if that doesn't get consumers patching, what...