Showing headlines posted by dcparris

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges on Tuesday and agreed to help U.S. prosecutors in a corruption probe that could involve several top Republican lawmakers, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion before a federal judge in Washington. He also will plead guilty to conspiracy and wire fraud in a separate case in Miami on Wednesday, his lawyer there said.

[Ed: This story ties in with recent articles by LXer Editor-in-Chief, Tom Adelstein, "Following the Microsoft Money Trail". Abramoff figures prominently in Adelstein's articles. - dcparris]

Sony's settlement over the rootkit fiasco represents a blueprint for legislative action, argues law professor Michael Geist. The settlement seeks to both compensate US consumers for the harm they suffered from the Sony CDs and to place limits on Sony's future use of TPMs.

[Ed: If you're interested in copy restriction measures, you'll want to read this. - dcparris]

Hackers have cracked the Xbox 360 puzzle game Hexic HD in order to discover more about the inner workings of Microsoft's new console. Files from the puzzle game have been extracted, burned to disc, and booted from a standard Xbox 360 console. The game can also be run on PC.

One of Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) lead intellectual property law firms has asked the United States Patent & Trademark Office to open a new reexamination of the Eolas patent. The Eolas patent covers "a system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object."

Management said that technology buyers are narrowing their lists of approved vendors, which magnifies the success of category leaders. For the fourth quarter, Red Hat expects to earn 11 to 12 cents a share, 15% above estimates and double the year-ago earnings. According to International Data Corp., dollar sales of servers shipped with Linux installed grew 34.3% in the quarter, with unit shipments up 20.5%. Sales and earnings are expected to grow at double-digit rates for several more quarters.

(Fortune) Technology users, prepare to be sold. Intel, the world's most important semiconductor maker, has decided that it wants to be inside far more than just your PC. As a result, if you pay attention to anything having to do with digital gadgets, bits and bytes, software and hardware, starting this week Intel (Research) plans to make it damn near impossible to ignore the company's new message.

Queen Elizabeth II named Jonathan Ive, the designer of Apple Computer’s iPod and iMac, to the Queen’s New Year’s Honors List. The 38-year-old London-born Apple employee was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) on Saturday.

[Ed: It still doesn't do Ogg-Vorbis. Well, congrats to you Jonathan! - dcparris]

Windows users should install an unofficial security patch now, without waiting for Microsoft to make its move, advised security researchers at The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC).

[Ed: For our readers who still deal with Windows, you'll want to pay attention to the WMF vulnerability! - dcparris]

(InfoWorld Electronic News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)MySQL 5.0 has finally been released to much anticipation from the open source community. The new version includes some important enhancements that make an upgrade mandatory for 4.1 users, including improved security and stored procedures. All in all, MySQL 5.0 is a respectable open source database, but its still a few steps below the big four databases (IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase) when it comes to management and development tools.

In the first two parts of this series we looked at how to create a PC 'rescue disc' using Knoppix, a version of the Linux operating system (OS). It boots from a CD and allows you to revive a dead PC, so you can continue working, retrieve files, open documents and so on. We now turn our attention to creating a more specialised rescue disc that can help to recover files and more, including diagnose and repair faults to the Windows operating system.

[Ed: A Windows rescue CD? Well, if you have to work with it... - dcparris]

Designed for back-end deployment on Nitix Linux-based OS, Sage Accpac ERP uses IBM DB2 or Pervasive.SQL database to provide automated ERP administration. Front-end software can be run on both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, with ability to run Linux and Windows clients in parallel against same database. Sage Accpac ERP also enables small enterprises freedom to choose from variety of industry leading databases.

Introducing Nicholas Petreley as the new Editor in Chief ofLinux Journal.

[Ed: Here's wishing Nicholas all the best in his new position as LJ's Editor-in-Chief - dcparris]

A new Trojan horse is designed to produce forge Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan attempts to incorporate its ads in Google AdSense publishers program. Once installed, the Trojan horse downloads itself onto the computer and replaces the original ads with its own ads.

Imagine a world in which carts full of goods are designed to be pulled by a single horse. If the horse slows down, the cart moves more slowly. If the horse dies unexpectedly, the cart comes to an immediate halt and a lot of time and money is expended, pulling all the contents out of the cart for transfer to a second horse-and-cart combo.

[Ed: While Windows as an alternative OS would never cross my mind, I still think the article has value. Find a decent OS, like one of the BSDs or something. Windows? Ya gotta be kidding! - dcparris]

Linux users feel pretty content just running their systems. Some even complain when newswires run stories about Microsoft. The users don't feel threatened, but should they?

Like many schools, Parkhill Junior School in Essex, UK, was short on space and short on money, but long on the need to keep up with the ever-expanding role of technology in the classroom. Alison Seagrave, the computer curriculum development manager at Parkhill, found a way to provide her students with more computers, Internet access, and a good selection of software, all for under£1,000, using Linux.

[Ed: Excellent case study on GNU/Linux in schools - dcparris]

If you need to give a presentation, you're going to need slides. If you don't give presentations often, you may spend a lot of time playing hunt-the-feature with a traditional presentation application as you try to bring the slides in your mind's eye to the screen. Pylize, a Python-based command-line tool, lets you use familiar HTML coding techniques to get the job done.

Do you have to spend $80 to $100 on security software with that new computer? No. Pick a Macintosh or Linux computer, and you're pretty well protected from Internet threats such as viruses and spyware.

[Ed: It's more about freeware than free software. Still, it's good they mentioned GNU/Linux and Mac as solid options. - dcparris]

In the coming year, data warehousing trends will be driven by factors obvious and less obvious. Among the obvious drivers are data volumes that continue to grow by leaps and bounds, increasing intolerance for latency in getting answers to business questions and the expanding diversity and complexity of data types.

While I wouldn't use the phrase "evil capitalist", it is important for policy makers and politicians to realize that members of Orwellian double-speak named organizations like the "Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft" (CAAST) are just as (or more) likely to infringe software copyright (and patents) as anyone else. They do not occupy the "moral high ground", any more than Sony-BMG did as they infringed copyright in their XCP "copy protection" software (as well as circumventing the security of computers, and many other immoral acts that they are being taken to court over).

[Ed: While the aticle has nothing whatsoever to do with Link-sys, it is nevertheless an interesting article on the two-faced views of some, where copyright is concerned. - dcparris]