jbrodkin

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/windows-8-mail-leaves-users-pining-for-the-desktop-or-even-their-phones/

The e-mail client in Windows 8 is the shell of a potentially good application—but Microsoft hasn't given it the proper care it deserves. With less than a month before Windows 8 hits RTM, Mail is a mess that doesn't support IMAP, can't connect to servers with self-signed certificates, and lacks basic features like flagging messages for followup. Metro Mail is feature-deficient compared not just...

http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/best-buy-collecting-email-passwords/

Best Buy's surprisingly insecure setup process for new PC buyers involves customers writing down their desired login passwords, and handing them to a Best Buy employee.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/facebook-asserts-trademark-on-word-book-in-new-user-agreement.ars

Facebook is trying to expand its trademark rights over the word "book" by adding the claim to a newly revised version of its "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," the agreement all users implicitly consent to by using or accessing Facebook. The company has registered trademarks over its name and many variations of it, but not on the word "book". By inserting the trademark claim into the...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/090111-microsoft-weaknesses-250165.html?hpg1=bn

Microsoft is still a giant no matter how you measure it, but its position as the world's dominant provider of software to consumers is at risk. The primary factors (cough, Apple and Google, cough) can be debated, but this article argues that Microsoft's five biggest weaknesses are in search, Web browsers, Web servers, mobile devices, and Windows itself. Microsoft was provided the list in...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/072211-adobe-lion.html

More than a dozen Adobe products are not working properly on Mac OS X Lion, Apple's new desktop operating system, continuing Adobe's struggles to make its software compatible with Apple products. Adobe initially claimed Lion dropped support for Flash hardware acceleration. While it later retracted that claim, the list of Adobe products with issues on Lion is still a long one.

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/072011-lion-upgrade.html#slide1

Assuming you don't use applications that require PowerPC, upgrading from Mac's Snow Leopard to Lion could very well be the easiest OS upgrade you've ever met. Here are the results of my own upgrade, with screenshots throughout the process.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/071811-microsoft-hyperv-linux.html?hpg1=bn

It was recently reported that Microsoft is now one of the top corporate contributors to the Linux kernel. But the reason for Redmond's recent flurry of contributions lies in the fact that its two-year-old project to get Hyper-V drivers into the Linux kernel has taken longer than expected. The drivers are still in the kernel staging tree, and Microsoft has to finish the items on a to-do list...

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/tablet-not-pc-or-why-microsofts-windows-8-str

Microsoft's mobile chief Andy Lees turned a few heads this week by declaring that a tablet is just another PC, and that Windows 8 tablets will do everything Windows 8 desktops can do. Given that this strategy has been a total failure with Windows 7, pundits are puzzled by Microsoft's insistence on treating PCs and mobile devices as if they are identical twins. Windows 7 tablets displayed at the...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070611-microsoft-android.html

You may already know Microsoft has forced five Android vendors to pay royalties each time they ship a device, and is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble in cases that claim Android steals Microsoft intellectual property. Exactly which patents are supposedly violated by Google's Android mobile OS? Microsoft isn't revealing the details in cases settled without a lawsuit, but court documents...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/070511-microsoft-patent-android.html?hpg1=bn

One of Microsoft's hottest new profit centers is a smartphone platform you've definitely heard of: Android. Google's Linux-based mobile operating system is a favorite target for Microsoft's patent attorneys, who are suing numerous Android vendors and just today announced that another manufacturer has agreed to write checks to Microsoft every time it ships an Android device. Vendors paying off...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/061311-mark-shuttleworth.html

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is a big fan of Google Chrome, and says the browser could replace the standard Firefox in future versions of Ubuntu Linux. "We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox," he says. But the work that Google is doing with Chrome OS — essentially the Chrome browser on top of Linux — is potentially leading to a future in...

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/052611-windows-1.html#slide1

25 years after it came out, it's still possible to run Windows 1.0 in a virtual machine. While you can't connect to the Internet, you can play Reversi and see the first version of Notepad - which is pretty similar to the one in Windows 7. Here's a look at the first version of Windows.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/052011-google-calendar.html

Google's calendar service for home users and businesses has been plagued with missed email reminders for years, and Google is still struggling the fix the problem, according to support forums. One support forum on Google.com titled "Google Calendar Email Notification Not Working" was started in September 2010, and is still going strong with dozens of posts this week alone. Another support...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/050511-red-hat-ceo-patents.html?hpg1=bn

With Red Hat on the verge of becoming the first billion-dollar company focused exclusively on open source software, it has attracted quite a bit of attention — from lawyers waving patents. And although Red Hat fights lawsuits when it deems it necessary, CEO Jim Whitehurst says it's often just better to pay the trolls to make them go away. "When it's so little money, at some point, bluntly, it's...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/050311-mickos-mysql.html?hpg1=bn

Despite concerns that Oracle would be unfriendly to open source projects acquired through the merger with Sun, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says the MySQL code base is in fantastic condition. Version 5.5 of the MySQL database "probably is the best MySQL version ever produced," Mickos said.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/microsoft-office-and-kinect-lead-growth-micro

Microsoft raked in $16 billion in revenue and more than $5 billion in profit - but it wasn't enough to top Apple which is more profitable than Microsoft for the first time in a long time.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/042011-linux-patent-protection.html

Facebook and HP have joined IBM and Red Hat in a Linux patent protection network that is acquiring rights to patents to prevent Linux-using members from being sued. The group is also giving a leadership role to Google, which is fighting lawsuits targeting Linux-based Android.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/041111-amazon-cloud-supercomputer.html

Without much fanfare, Amazon officials last year built a supercomputer on the EC2 cloud service that placed 231st on the most recent Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The 7,000-core cluster, de-provisioned soon after running the Linpack test, used Linux, Intel Xeon X5570 processors and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect. Amazon's James Hamilton said the Top 500 run proves that...

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html

HPC vendor Cycle Computing recently built a 10,000-core Linux cluster on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, in what might have been the largest HPC deployment to date on the Amazon service.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040511-linux-vs-microsoft.html?hpg1=bn

Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims. "I think we just don't care...

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/googles-autocomplete-ditches-algorithms-human

This Google April Fools Day prank sounds creepily similar to what most of us just assume Google already does

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/linus-torvalds-android-copyright-violation-cl

Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds has scoffed at a new claim that Android violates the Linux license. Google's use of the Bionic Library does not result in a deriviative work that has to be licensed under GPL, as some lawyers are claiming, Torvalds says. "It seems totally bogus," Torvalds said. "We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in...

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2011/031011-google-chrome10.html

Boosted JavaScript performance, Adobe Flash sandboxing, password encryption and an overhauled settings interface are among the new features in Google Chrome 10. JavaScript pages should now load 12% faster than in previous versions, and Chrome 10 beats IE9 by at least 50% in a JavaScript benchmark.