High Powered File Sharing - Free, so I tried it, and…

Slashdot It! For a while now, I’ve been looking for a consolidated place to store and share files. Pics, videos, large files — so many needs, so few offerings. FileDropper came highly recommended, but there was a cost associated. Granted, the basic plan was only $.99 per month, but it’s still a hassle to buy anything on the Internet when there are free alternatives. Then, someone sent me an offer for a Free accounts for bloggers as well as members of Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, and del.icio.us. It was a sign. I tried it tonight. What I found was that their claim of being “The simplest file sharing website ever” is quite true. The interface is one that my mother-in-law can use (and she has trouble with working her email). Member files are never deleted, it has incredibly fast upload and download speed, and there are no count down timers. MegaUpload has issues. A premium account is great but when you upload something and send it to your friends, they have to wait for a slot to clear. You get 250 gigs of file storage with a $9.99 monthly fee. It’s the slowest service I have tried, particularly in the download area. If you don’t have a US, UK, or Canada based IP, you’re in for a long wait. Worst of all, the beeping buttons when you mouse-over them drives me insane. RapidShare is one of the most popular options for downloading or uploading files. The monthly account is around 10 euro and provides some good options for premium users. The problems is, when it comes to the free user, the road is a bit rocky. There is excessive pressure to sign up for a paid account and bandwidth is slower for free users. While I’m not a big fan of paying for anything when there is a free alternative, I can say that FileDropper would be something that I would actually buy. Luckily, I don’t have to. This free offer came at the right time. I’m a blogger, digger, stumbler, redditer, mixxer, and deliciouser, so I think I qualified for the freebie. FYI, it expires May 15. * * * Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search

Slashdot It! Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages. On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar. Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image. Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged. “We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said. The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.” The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images. Google is not the first into the visual product search category. Riya, a Silicon Valley start-up, introduced Like.com in 2006. The service, which refers users to shopping sites, makes it possible for a Web shopper to select a particular visual attribute, such as a certain style of brown shoes or a style of buckle, and then be presented with similar products available from competing Web merchants. Rather than relying on a text query, the service focuses on the ability to match shapes or objects that might be hard to describe in writing, said Munjal Shah, the chief executive of Riya. “I think what they’re trying to accomplish is largely impossible,” he said. “Our belief is, there is not large-scale solutions.” Mr. Shah said there had been a number of technology demonstrations by Google Labs researchers, such as a project in 2005 that used machine learning techniques to recognize the gender of a person in an image. However, the company has been slow to deploy its research, he said. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone

Slashdot It! STEVE JOBS, Apple’s chief executive and field general, has Napoleonic dreams of global conquest for his 10-month-old wonder gadget, the iPhone. So it may be fitting that he’s encountering his most serious resistance in a city called Waterloo. That is where, 70 miles west of Toronto in Ontario, 19 nondescript, low-rise office buildings comprise the headquarters of Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. R.I.M. is the North American leader in building smartphones, those versatile handsets that operate more like computers than phones. But R.I.M. may have trouble dominating the market’s next phase. Once the exclusive domain of e-mail-obsessed professionals, smartphones are now prized by consumers who want easy access to the Web, digital music and video even more than an omnipresent connection to their in-boxes. Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers. An industry once characterized by brain-numbing acronyms and droning discussions about enterprise security is now defined by buzz around handset design, video games and mobile social networks. That means R.I.M., which has historically viewed big corporations and wireless carriers as its bedrock customers, needs to alter its DNA in a hurry. While business is booming in Waterloo, analysts are raising an important question about R.I.M.’s future: Can a company that defined mobile e-mail for a generation of thumb-jockeys with bad posture also dominate the new consumer market for smartphones? “The vultures are circling,” says Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a research firm in Wayland, Mass. “There is this sense that the R.I.M. franchise is under assault.” In the short term, Apple’s noisy entrance into the smartphone market has elevated the visibility of smartphones and enhanced the prospects of most of its rivals. Worldwide, smartphone shipments jumped 60 percent in the last three months of 2007 over the same period the previous year, according to IDC, the tracking firm. Of the two billion cellphones sold last year, nearly 125 million were smartphones — a share that analysts expect to inexorably grow. R.I.M. added 6.5 million subscribers in its last fiscal year, twice the previous year’s amount, and its stock hit the stratosphere, more than doubling in value as investors anticipated the coming Age of the Smartphone. And R.I.M. has already introduced catchy mainstream gadgetry. The BlackBerry Pearl and Curve, two phones aimed explicitly at the consumer market, have sold well, particularly during the holiday season, and now account for a majority of R.I.M.’s device sales. But there are also signs that R.I.M. faces steeper challenges. At the end of last year, BlackBerry had a 40 percent share of the United States smartphone market, down from 45 percent at the end of 2006, thanks largely to the 17.4 percent share the iPhone grabbed in its first six months. In March, Mr. Jobs announced that Apple would take the rare step of licensing Microsoft’s corporate e-mail technology, to allow iPhones to connect directly to business computers — a dagger aimed at the heart of R.I.M.’s strength in the corporate market. In Apple’s quarterly conference call last week, Apple executives said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones to their employees. Apple, meanwhile, in an effort to further increase its appeal to consumers, is also expected to introduce a new 3G version of the iPhone in June, which will work on speedier wireless networks and may further attract a new segment of customers to the iPhone in the United States and abroad. In describing the threat that Apple poses to R.I.M., Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, describes his wife’s entirely common use of the iPhone, which she takes to bed with her each night to browse the Web. “Some consumers who might have considered the BlackBerry, who don’t have the e-mail urgency of a mobile professional, are going to start selecting the iPhone,” Mr. Wolf says. “This isn’t going to stop R.I.M., but it is going to slow them down.” Via NYT Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

New phone model to spur sales: HTC

Slashdot It! High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電), the world’s biggest maker of phones running Microsoft Corp’s system, expects revenues this year to grow more than 20 percent year-on-year, helped by sales of its new “Touch” phone next month, a company executive said yesterday. Sales in the current quarter could reach NT$34 billion (US$1.12 billion), with 70 percent coming from high-priced third-generation (3G) handsets, aided by a new product launch on May 6 in London, HTC financial executive Cheng Hui-ming (鄭慧明) told an investor’s conference. That would represent a 27 percent increase from NT$26.86 billion during the same period last year, or a 7 percent quarter-on-quarter increase. Cheng also said the company was on track to hit its full-year revenue growth target of between 20 percent and 25 percent. “This is the most important product for HTC this year,” Cheng said. “With this phone, we’re confident of landing orders from most major operators.” But Cheng also warned of possible delays in shipments, as HTC has yet to obtain certification for the new handset model. “Postponing shipments of the new Diamond model may put the share price under pressure during Monday’s trading. Investors are highly sensitive to delays in product launches,” said Lu Chia-lin (呂家霖), an analyst at Macquarie. Macquarie has an “outperform” rating on HTC, with a target price ofNT$1,020, which implies about 30 percent upside. “HTC’s outlook for the second quarter, however, looks quite good,” Lu said, adding that its net income may be sustained at first quarter levels. Earlier this month, HTC said that net profits expanded at a faster-than-expected 25 percent year-on-year to NT$6.94 billion after deducting spending for employee bonuses, as it sold more high-margin 3G phones. Gross margins this quarter may drop by half or a full percentage point to 35 percent or 35.5 percent from last quarter’s 36.1 percent because of a one-time inventory write-off — not demand concerns, Cheng said. “[Demand in] Europe looks similar to what we saw in November and December,” Cheng said. HTC derives the bulk — or 40 percent — of its sales from Europe. Average selling prices are expected to remain firm in the current quarter, Cheng said, despite claims by rivals, such as Nokia Oyj, saying European demand was shifting to lower-priced models in the face of the economic slowdown. HTC also plans to raise its dividend payout ratio to about 70 percent based on last year’s earnings. The company paid out 60 percent last year. The board yesterday approved a proposal to distribute NT$34 per share in cash dividends and 30 percent in stock dividends based on the company’s earnings last year of NT$28.93 billion, or NT$50.44 per share. The proposal will be voted on at the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on June 30. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

AMD to Webcast Annual Meeting Of Stockholders

Slashdot It! AMD (NYSE:AMD) will hold its Annual Meeting of Stockholders at 9 a.m. CDT (10 a.m. EDT) on Thursday, May 8, 2008 at The Lakeway Resort and Spa in Austin, Texas. AMD will provide a real-time audio webcast of the meeting on the Investor Relations page of its Web site at http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/InvestorRelations/0,,51_306,00.html. The webcast will be available for 10 days after meeting. The 2007 Annual Report on Form 10-K and 2008 Proxy Statement are available online at http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/InvestorRelations/0,,51_306,00.html Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online

Slashdot It! With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web. (The staff will also produce two print products: a free weekly entertainment guide inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the paper.) An avowedly progressive paper that carried the banner of its founder, William T. Evjue, The Capital Times is wrapped up with the history of two larger-than-life Wisconsin senators, the elder Robert La Follette (whom it favored) and Joseph R. McCarthy (whom it opposed). But in recent years, the paper’s circulation dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of more than 40,000. “We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.” The transition in Madison, while long foretold — The Capital Times was doubly part of a dying breed, being the afternoon paper in a two-newspaper town — has hardly been neat and clean and cathartic. More than 20 members of the newsroom staff lost their jobs, mainly through buyouts, but also through layoffs. Each departing journalist was profiled in the final paper, and lives on at the Web site Madison.com under the headline “A Fond Farewell to Talented Colleagues,” with a “class photo” taken next to the presses. The new staff total will be in the 40s. This includes seven new hires in areas like Web producing and arts coverage. Copy editors, by contrast, are “exiting at a higher rate than reporters,” said Paul Fanlund, the editor who arrived from The State Journal in 2006. The Web strategy, while seen as a long-term solution, is still a work in progress, Mr. Fanlund says. It revolves around a portal, Madison.com, which is owned under the same joint arrangement mandating that both Madison papers share revenues, though they are editorially independent. The Capital Times will operate a nearly continuous Web newsroom and focus on repurposing online the cultural and entertainment material the staff will begin to produce in the supplement, 77 Square, to be inserted in The State Journal. “If there is a window of opportunity for newspapers on the Web, it is locally,” said James L. Baughman, director of the University of Wisconsin journalism school in Madison. “The reason the online version of the Cap Times may have life is that opportunity.” Once upon a time, the afternoon newspaper was the Internet of its day, Mr. Baughman said, giving afternoon baseball scores and stock market reports in a quick turnaround. It was the more lucrative slot as a result. The liberal afternoon newspaper still has a sympathetic audience in Madison, but the changing pace of news is more important. “The political activism is there, you can’t deny it,” he said of Madison’s newspaper readers, “but they want the morning box scores.” And while Mr. Fanlund takes pain to stress the need to continue the progressive editorials and watchdog role of the reinvented Capital Times, it is sports that serves as a perfect example of the changes he says have been long overdue. As an afternoon paper that did not publish on Sundays, he says, his sportswriters would be covering a college football game and “it would be 48 hours until the articles would be read.” Those writers, who will be making the transition online, “see the Web as a new lease on life.” But the decision to migrate online, and in free weeklies, necessarily involves reinventing the core mission at the newspaper and the core audience. The subscribers to The Cap Times reliably moved to The State Journal, a less progressive paper with the morning slot. In its account of The Capital Times’s last daily press run, The State Journal reported that it had “succeeded in garnering most of The Capital Times’s former subscribers and will see its average daily circulation rise from 89,000 to at least 104,000 starting Monday.” In the Madison weekly Isthmus, one columnist wrote that the new Capital Times suddenly looked like a rival going after the same “urban advertising market that Isthmus has cultivated for 32 years.” While acknowledging the long, proud print tradition there, the columnist, Marc Eisen, wrote: “Cap Times editors and reporters see themselves as reimagining founder Bill Evjue’s progressive vision for the Internet age. But, functionally, the new editions are all about the advertising.” Mr. Evjue is the old-world figure at the paper, the John Henry, of sorts, whose hammer — his typewriter — the staff still hears. The final paper showed him in a 1961 photograph pressing the button on new presses, embracing technological change. The final editorial of the print daily pledged itself to Mr. Evjue’s purpose as “an independent voice for peace and economic and social justice that speaks truth to power each and every day.” The editorial evoked him to give his endorsement of the steps the newspaper is taking: “He would caution us not to worry about the form The Capital Times takes, but rather to be concerned with the content and character of our message.” And, in its final words, to its final audience, wrote: “All will be well.” Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Ballmer: Vista a 'work in progress'

Slashdot It! Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer called Windows Vista "a work in progress" on Thursday, but he stopped short of committing to extend the life of its predecessor, Windows XP. "I think we did a lot of things right, and I think we have a lot of things we need to learn from," Ballmer told a crowd of independent technology experts attending the company's Most Valuable Professionals Summit in Seattle. Ballmer's comments come at a pivotal time in Windows Vista's life, as the company tries to get more businesses and consumers to upgrade. The PC operating system was released in stores in January 2007, and the company last month issued Vista's first big "service pack" update -- a large bundle of fixes and updates meant to address many of the problems experienced in its first year on the market. In the modern era of regular online updates, most pieces of software are effectively works in progress, even after their release. But Ballmer's use of the phrase is surprising, because to most people it would tend to connote "something unfinished," said Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter Research analyst. "It's hard to imagine that a comment like that is the type of thing that is going to instill greater confidence" about Windows Vista in the minds of companies and individual PC users, he said. Ballmer made the comments as part of a lively and wide-ranging address at the MVP Summit, an annual conference for independent technology gurus who specialize in specific Microsoft product lines. The deep expertise of the MVPs can lead to frank and detailed exchanges with Microsoft representatives. At the outset, Ballmer called it his "favorite speech every year." Attendees cheered Ballmer and presented him with articles of clothing as gifts, including a Canadian hockey jersey and a "Simpsons" necktie -- both of which he promptly donned. In a question-and-answer period, they quizzed him on such esoteric topics as the overlap between Microsoft's Sharepoint and Groove collaboration programs. On the subject of Windows Vista, Ballmer cited the need for further improvements in system performance, compatibility and battery life. He also acknowledged complaints about the operating system's size. Vista takes up more space on a computer than Windows XP does and requires more advanced hardware. The size issue is an area where "we can't just set the dial back, but I think people wish we could," Ballmer said. "Vista is bigger than XP. It's going to stay bigger than XP. We have to make sure it doesn't get bigger still." Microsoft has said it plans to end its retail and PC sales of Windows XP at the end of June except in some specific situations, such as a special category of low-cost computers. Ballmer acknowledged efforts to get Microsoft to change its mind, but gave no clear indication that it would. "I know we're going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available," he said. "We've got some opinions on that, we've expressed our views." At the same time, he told the crowd, "I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues." Ballmer also reiterated that Microsoft won't again take five years to come out with a new operating system, as was the case with Windows Vista. "Can we just sort of kiss that stone and move on?" he said. "Because it turns out many things become problematic when you have those long release cycles. ... We can't ever let that happen again." The company has said Windows Vista's successor, known by the internal code name "Windows 7," will be released in 2010. For some, Ballmer's Vista mea culpa wasn't necessary. "I'm surprised, because I never have any problems," said Andy Dunn, a Microsoft MVP from Kirkland. "Maybe I'm the only guy, but Vista works for me." One key, he acknowledged, was that he bought a new computer that was well-suited for handing the operating system. But the MVPs made it clear that they're not blindly loyal to Microsoft's products. At one point, Ballmer asked for a show of hands to see which search engines attendees used by default. The overwhelming favorite was Google, followed by Microsoft's Live Search. But only a few hands went in the air for Yahoo. "Wow, we offered 31 bucks a share," Ballmer said, somewhat facetiously, referring to the original value of Microsoft's pending offer to acquire Yahoo, the No. 2 player in the U.S. search market. Microsoft said about 1,800 people came to this year's MVP Summit from countries around the world. They also heard Thursday from Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Windows works well on One Laptop Per Child machine

Slashdot It! Microsoft's Windows software works well on the One Laptop Per Child Foundation's XO Laptop, the group's founder said in an e-mail posted on his group's website. Nicholas Negroponte also said that, after several months of discussions with the world's largest software maker, his foundation plans to adapt its Sugar software package, which runs the XO Laptop, so it is compatible with Windows. Sugar was designed only to work with a version of the Linux operating system that engineers from Red Hat Inc helped the foundation develop. "Sugar needs a wider basis," Negroponte said in the email. Microsoft's success in developing a version of Windows that works on the XO ensures it will not miss out on a chance to expose its operating system to the millions of grammar school children who Negroponte hopes will one day use machines made by his foundation. In October, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole told Reuters the company was spending "a nontrivial amount of money" on adapting a basic version of Windows so it would be compatible with the XO laptop. Now the nonprofit group and Microsoft plan to develop a version of the XO that runs both Windows and Linux software, Negroponte said in his email. "It (Windows) works well and now needs Sugar on top of it," he said. The OLPC Foundation is a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that late last year started producing its first product, the XO laptop at a manufacturing cost of about US$188 per machine. Sugar is a suite of educational software that includes a user interface for the green-and-white machines, which were designed for elementary school children in developing countries. Programs in the sugar suite include software for composing music, taking photos and creating animated videos. The foundation sold them in North America for US$400 through a holiday giving program that also provided one to a poor child overseas. A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company did not immediately have any comment. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Wireless power

Slashdot It! A simple-to-make "superlens" can focus 10 times more sharply than a conventional lens. It could shrink the size of features on computer chips, or help power gadgets without wires. No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the "diffraction limit". This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips. Researchers have devised ways to beat the diffraction limit before, using bizarre "metamaterials" that are hard to make, and which are also the basis of prototype "invisibility cloaks". But such complex mixes of material stuffed with tiny loops of metal and precisely-shaped holes are unlikely to become a mass-production technology. Simply super Anthony Grbic, Lei Jiang and Roberto Merlin at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, US, have now successfully made a much simpler design, first theorised last year. The new lens is a 127-micrometer-thick plate of teflon and ceramic with a copper topping. "The beauty of these is that they're planar," Grbic says, "they're easy to fabricate." The lenses can be made through a single step of photolithography, the process used to etch computer chips. By selectively etching away the copper, Grbic and colleagues created many capacitors sandwiched together. Capacitors are typically used in electronics for storing electric charge for short periods. In the lens, the capacitors instead interact directly with electromagnetic waves like light. This sets up currents in the capacitors that focus the waves passing through the lens into a point 20 times smaller than their wavelength. That is 10 times tighter than a conventional lens can achieve, hampered by the diffraction limit. Microwave trials The team's current prototype works on microwaves, which are easier to focus because they have longer wavelengths than visible light. Simply making capacitors of different sizes would allow the lens to focus other frequencies, including visible and infrared light, says Grbic. Grbic and colleagues have a variety of uses for their new lenses planned, including focusing light into smaller spots during photolithography to etch smaller features onto computer chips. The lenses could also help refine a technique to transfer power wirelessly developed in 2006. The new lenses could create more energy-dense beams of the electromagnetic waves used to transfer power, Grbic says. "Ingenious" The theory behind these lenses is "ingenious," says John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, who in 2006 proved invisibility cloaks could be possible. "This is an important step forward in sub-wavelength imaging with considerable potential applications," he adds. Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, agrees, saying the new design has "exciting potential." But the more complex metamaterial lenses will likely be more applicable to more diverse applications, he adds. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Dell: We'll install XP for you, even after the deadline

Slashdot It! It seems that Michael Dell is breathing new life into his company. A year ago, Dell was brave enough to backtrack on its Vista-only policy for consumer machines (Dell brings back XP on home systems). It also showed some independence from Microsoft by offering Linux to consumers. And again, Dell is innovating. Fact 1: As of June 30, large computer manufacturers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard can no longer offer Windows XP preinstalled on new computers, though Microsoft has said it would consider re-evaluating the deadline if there's enough customer demand. Fact 2: Anyone who buys a copy of either the Business or Ultimate versions of Vista is entitled to also get Windows XP Professional.* Each computer manufacturer decides whether, or how, to implement this. Until now, consumers who exercised their right to get XP Professional when they purchased Vista got a computer with Vista preinstalled and an XP image CD in the box (an image CD is very different from a retail Windows CD). Dell's innovation? It will do the XP image installation for you. It may not sound like much, but the net result is that the computer leaves the factory with Windows XP Professional on it, rather than Vista. Deadline? We don't need no stinkin' deadline. Microsoft can't be happy about this, though a cynic would note that even though Dell computers leave the factory with XP on them, Microsoft can tally it as a sale for Vista. It's an interesting power play between the two companies. Will other companies follow Dell or toe the Microsoft line? According to Randy Copeland, president and CEO of Velocity Micro, after the June 30 deadline, all of its computers will ship with Vista preinstalled. The company will offer the XP Professional "downgrade" in the traditional way, by including an XP image CD in the box. Interestingly, each XP image CD will be mated to one, and only one, computer. Dell has a Web page devoted to its new policy, Windows XP Availability, which notes that the last day to buy a computer with Windows XP preinstalled under the current rules is June 18. Afterward: When selecting your operating system, you will see an option called "Genuine Windows® Vista Business BONUS" and "Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate BONUS." With these options, you may...have Dell factory install Windows XP Professional. You will also receive a backup media disc for Windows XP Professional, as well as the media for Windows Vista. In other words, Dell provides optical discs for both XP and Vista, so you can change over at any time. This is not like Apple's Boot Camp, however; the computer can have only one operating installed on the hard disk at a time. But Dell provides technical support for both XP and Vista. Whether its tech support is worthwhile is another matter. According to Infoworld, Dell will offer this new "buy Vista, get XP Pro preinstalled" service on some Latitude, OptiPlex, and Precision systems for free. It will also offer it on some Vostro and XPS systems for a small fee. For more about getting Windows XP after the June 30 deadline, see my previous posting, Who's selling Windows XP in July? Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Red Zune 80 Coming to Retail

Slashdot It! Some of you may have noticed already, but Red Zune 80s are beginning to make their way into retail stores. After returning to Zune Originals, Red Zune 80 will soon be available for purchase at retail stores.

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Microsoft's Xbox division turns a profit (again!)

Slashdot It! Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD) is one happy division, because for a second fiscal quarter they've turned a nice profit and are Microsoft's shiny badge of success. For the third fiscal quarter, Microsoft revealed that the Xbox 360's EDD turned an operating profit of $89 million seeing an operating income of $614 million which is a major improvement of last year's $746 million operating loss. Analyzing the numbers further, we see that third quarter EDD sales rose 68% to $1.58 billion (up 35% to $6.57 billion for the nine month period) and Microsoft shipped 1.3 million consoles in the third quarter alone. Oh, and the reason for such impressive numbers? High demand for the Xbox 360 which now has cumulative sales of 19 million units. A 74% increase over last year. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Radiohead go green for live show

Slashdot It! Radiohead have decided not to travel to the US for a promotional performance because of concerns over global warming. The Oxford five-piece are due to appear on a special edition of NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The band opted to record a live version of House Of Cards in London rather than fly over to the US for the one-off performance. Radiohead will appear on the show as part of NBC's Green Week. Frontman Thom Yorke said the band avoided leaving a carbon footprint equivalent to driving a car for a solid year by recording the track in London. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

KDE in Public Schools in Brazil

Slashdot It! One of the highlights of fisl9.0 for me was getting to know better the work that is being done by Brazil's Ministry of Education (MEC). They have just unveiled the numbers for the ongoing ProInfo project. What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity) but also open content to students in public schools. The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0", a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project. You can have a look at the clean desktop here: Notice the addition of a quick navigation bar on top: this was the result of study conducted by the project's researchers, and gives quick access to content and activities. The whole system performs extremely well and it was available at the forum in multiterminal stations. This new versions incorporates lots of improvements gathered from the feedback provided by the previous version, which is already deployed to thousands of labs in the country. For the first time, MEC shared some of the number for the ProInfo project. I will post some slides here, which I translated to English from the original Portuguese ones presented at the conference: As this first slide shows, until the end of this year there will be already 29,000 labs deployed, serving approximately 36 million students. This number grows to more than 53,000 by the end of 2009, and at that time 52 million students will have access to them. You can also see in the slide a solution that is being developed for classrooms: a single hardware unit with integrated projector, cpu, bundled content and DVD player. With it, digital content will no longer be restricted to the info lab, and will be usable by teachers in the traditional classrooms as well. Each info lab contains a server and 7 CPUs, providing 15 access points via a multiterminal hardware and software solution: There is also a different lab configuration for schools in rural areas. These schools usually have only one or two rooms, and very weak infrastructure. So a solution that minimizes power consumption was devised, and it allows 5 seats using a single CPU, with no server required: ProInfo also specifies a different configuration for the SEESPs, the schools for people with special needs. In this case a very large LCD monitor is used as the display, bundled with accessibility tools in the distribution: Brazil is also in the second phase of the UCA (One computer per student) project. There was not a lot of information about it, other than they are going ahead with the trials, and expect to deploy 150,000 machines in this next phase of the project: The open content and the Linux Educational distribution can be found at http://webeduc.mec.gov.br/ for now, in Portuguese only. I was told that they are looking into ways for sharing this content with other projects in Latin America and Worldwide. As a member of KDE, I was personally thrilled to see our software as an enabler for projects of this magnitude. We are talking about ways to collaborate with MEC to incorporate KDE4 applications in the near future to the distribution, and work with their team to gather feedback from teachers and students, and make sure high quality free software is available to all students in public schools in Brazil. This is just the start, I can not wait to see what we will have 5 years from now. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

Spam reaches 30

Slashdot It! Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever. That commercial message, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. Recipients complained directly to Thuerk, who had made no attempt to hide his identity, and DEC was reprimanded by the Arpanet administrators. Nevertheless, the email was a portent of things to come. Today, spam makes up 80 to 90% of all emails sent – around 120 billion messages per day – and is a multi-billion dollar industry. Spam wars Today spammers target not just email, but also websites, blogs, social networking sites, and cellphones. And there seems to be no end in sight, as spam-fighters struggle to keep the junk from overwhelming useful communications. Spammers and anti-spammers seem locked in an arms race. No one expects that the fight against spam will be won anytime soon, despite Bill Gates promise in 2004 that the world would be spam-free by 2006. The first spam message was the product of a more innocent time. Thuerk sent the ad for a new computer model from his own email address, and had a co-worker type in all of the addresses by hand, says Brad Templeton, an internet pioneer, now chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Templeton has documented the first spam on his website. "Almost everybody who is involved in net issues got pretty interested in spam," he says. "It was the first really bad thing that people started doing on the internet, in terms of letting the small town rules break down and start abusing people." Spam for dummies Spam grabbed mainstream attention in 1994, when Arizona lawyers Laurence A Canter and Martha S Siegel posted a commercial spam to 6000 Usenet discussion groups advertising their services as immigration lawyers. The two lawyers went on to write books about how to spam, helping others start spamming too. The first wave of spammers saw their email inboxes flooded with angry responses, and were often kicked off of their accounts by their ISPs. Canter and Seigel's book also prompted the development of the first software that aimed to detect and delete spam messages. Spamming went underground as people quickly learned to hide their identities and locations. A cat and mouse game has ensued. Organizations like the Spamhaus Project publish lists of IP addresses known to produce spam. ISPs use the information to block email to their users from those addresses. The latest spam filters use Bayesian filters that learn to distinguish spam using the content of emails, or systems that identify new spam through digital "fingerprints". Spam gets clever Spammers have fought against these countermeasures with countermeasures of their own. To avoid being tracked down, spammers have created large "botnets" of millions of "zombie" computers – under outside control, unbeknownst to their owners. These botnets are used to send out huge volumes of spam, which can be hard to identify and block because they are decentralized. Spammers also tweak the contents of their spams to defeat filtering techniques. Many spams contain "word salad" – for example, extracts culled from free online books – to disguise spam messages. Other spammers constantly mutate their spam so that it can't be easily recognized using fingerprinting. Nevertheless, spam defences do work, to an extent, says Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist at Cloudmark, an anti-spam company based in San Francisco, California, US. One reason so much spam is sent is that such a small proportion of it beats ISP's defenses and makes it into inboxes, he says. Spammers have to send out more just to make sure some of it gets through. The price of spam But while the cost to spammers remains low, ISPs and their customers pay a higher price because of the bandwidth wasted, and the cost of the filtering technology. Ferris Research, another San Francisco-based firm, estimates that the cost of fighting spam will be $140 billion globally in 2008. "You can buy your way out of the problem. But once you start paying money to buy your way out, it ups the ante for the spammer," O'Donnell says. John Aycock, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary, Canada, worries that email spammers will eventually use their zombie computers to write better spam. Programs could customize spam, he predicts, writing it in the same style, and about the same subjects, as the owner of the computer. When sent to the owner's personal contacts this technique could make spam even more difficult to detect and block. New flavours of spam In the meantime, spammers have moved beyond email. In Asia, where internet access using cellphones is more common, phone spam is becoming more common. On the web, automated software creates spam blogs, or "splogs," that exist entirely to host advertising. On social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, spammers send phony "friend" requests simply so they can flood their new friends with spam messages. The bad news is that no one thinks spam is going away anytime soon – and that new ways to communicate will always lead to new types of spam. The good news is that early predictions that spam would bring the internet grinding to a halt have not been borne out. "So long as email is still usable, I think spam is just going to be some of the necessary background noise. I think there are enough methods that bad guys could use to continue to pump out spam for years to come that we're still going to be stuck with it for awhile," Aycock says. 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Soviet Internet domain name resists death

Slashdot It! The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost. Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or "Ours," is a pro-Kremlin youth group that gained notoriety for raucous protests against Kremlin critics. The group loyally praises President Vladimir Putin at "nashi.su," though it denies its choice of the ".su" domain was meant to send a political message. Many Web entrepreneurs also see potential profits in the domain, grabbing instantly recognizable names already claimed in other, better known domains. A small Moscow car repair shop that specializes in Ford vehicles boasts a home page at "ford.su," while the owner of "apple.su" is a Muscovite who said he is ready to swap it for a new laptop computer -- and not necessarily a Mac from Apple Inc. Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought "microsoft.su" last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for his e-mail address. While Khramov insists he "did not buy it for reselling," others are out to make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile addresses, including "ussr.su," "stalin.su" and "kgb.su" -- he's asking for $30,000 each, but stands ready to haggle. With few exceptions -- namely, the tech-savvy Baltic state of Estonia -- Internet penetration is relatively low in the former Soviet republics. Russia's Public Opinion Foundation says that only 27 percent of Russian adults use the Internet -- and only about 12 percent of the adults on any given day. Yet many Internet entrepreneurs are passionate about the ".su" domain, even as others are scornful of it as a relic of the past, saying it doesn't deserve the same status as ".ru" for Russia, ".uk" for the United Kingdom or ".fr" for France. "They are selling tickets to a drowning ship," said Anton Nosik, a veteran Web journalist and founder of several successful online projects. "Their message is to losers and latecomers." What's next? Domain names for the Roman Empire or Ancient Greece? Country-code domains, derived from a list kept by the International Organization for Standardization, typically disappear when a country ceases to exist or changes its name. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia lost their domain names after they broke up into smaller nations. So did Zaire after it became the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Internet's key oversight agency, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and its predecessors have made several efforts since the 1990s to eliminate the ".su" address. All have failed. In late 2006, ICANN even sought advice from the community on how best to revoke outdated suffixes. Yet the resistance continued, and the phase-out seems to be in a stalemate. The domain continues to work normally, but listed in records as "being phased out." "There are no technical issues," said John Crain, ICANN's chief technical officer. "It all comes down to politics." The ".su" domain dates back to September 1990, a little more than a year before the Soviet collapse. Russia was given the ".ru" domain name in 1994. Other former Soviet republics were also assigned codes. But the owners of ".su" sites stubbornly resisted switching on commercial, political and patriotic grounds. Some even accused the White House of scheming to eliminate the last remnants of its Cold War rival. As a compromise, the Russian organization responsible for registering new domain names under ".su" agreed to stop issuing new ones, while existing ".su" addresses were allowed to continue for the time being. A loophole allowed existing ".su" addresses like "lenin.su" to assign subdomains such as "vladimir.lenin.su." As a result, the online population at ".su" kept growing throughout the 1990s -- although not nearly as fast as ".ru." Then, in 2001, in response to pressure from users eager for freer access, registration in ".su" was opened to everyone everywhere. The price was kept artificially high -- $120 per name, six times the price for ".ru" -- to limit the number of new users and prevent entrepreneurs from grabbing names for resale in a practice called cybersquatting, said Andrey Vorobyev, spokesman for RU-Center, the body authorized to register domain names. But in January, RU-Center dropped the price for ".su" to $25 in a bid to boost the domain's worldwide popularity. The attractive new price sparked a registration rush that bumped up the number of ".su" sites to 45,000 today, more than quadruple the 11,000 registered as of late 2006. The demand shows no signs of relenting -- the jump from 31,000 in January represents a 45 percent rise. But by domain name standards, the number of ".su" registrations is still very small. Russia's ".ru," for instance, has more than 1 million names. Germany's ".de" has 12 million, and the global ".com" has about 75 million. Champions of the online Soviet domain say there is still plenty of room for growth. Some envisage the ".su" domain as a virtual venue for those who fondly recall the old Soviet Union as a place where Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet empire, knit together a host of Asian and European ethnic groups and cultures. And by late April, the ".su" domain plans to start allowing names in Russian; currently such names are limited to English letters, numerals and the hyphen. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post

The Pirate Bay Launches Uncensored Blogging Service

Slashdot It! In their ever continuing battle to free the Internet, The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want, without being afraid to get shut down by their blog host. The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service. Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material. This, of course, goes against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine. On the frontpage of the newly launched service Brokep writes: “Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it”. In a response, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress told TorrentFreak that he supports Pirate Bay’s Baywords, but he assured us that Wordpress.com would never take down a blog for posting deviating thoughts or ideas. “WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for “uncomfortable thoughts and ideas”, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that. However as a US-based companies we must comply with US laws, which means if the primary purpose of a blog is distributing illegal material it’s not a good fit for WordPress.com,” Matt said. Baywords is currently working on expanding the feature list to include support for domain redirects and improved stats. The service is ad-free for now, but Brokep told TorrentFreak that there will be ads blended into the blog design later, to cover the expenses. This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has launched a service where people can publish whatever they want, without being censored. They have already created an image hosting service for this reason, and a YouTube competitor is soon to follow. For people who are considering moving their Wordpress or Blogger account over to Baywords, importing is pretty straightforward and compatible with all the popular blog platforms. Don’t forget to add TorrentFreak to your blogroll! Update: Matt Mullenweg’s response was added to the article after publication. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare Get paid $7.50 for reviewing my post