Business and Technology

The Apple Macintosh perform 24 years of its launch in the market this January 24, and with it the introduction of the graphical environment to the general public. Prior to the Apple Macintosh PC, the model Lisa, had already offered a graphical environment and mouse, but at a prohibitive price of nearly $ 10000. To commemorate the date Dave Clausen, has made a modification of a case Macintosh 512k and has changed the mainboard by a Mac Mini, in addition to making the appropriate adjustments in order to withstand a floppy LS120 and the classic keyboard and the mouse Macintosh 512k. The steps required to replicate the feat, circuits, photos and videos of the project are on the website of Dave. Here the video of Steve Jobs introducing the Apple Macintosh:

In 1987, Guns N’ Roses, rock band release its firs album "Appetite for Destruction", in which "Sweet Child O’Mine" was the first number one hit of the band. But I found this video, which is really funny, the same song but in unplugged version played by Indian musicians:

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages (despite the social-networking site’s rule against such ads)

They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social-networking profile pages.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Weblo shares ad revenues with the people who let it place ads on their pages. It will be interesting to see how long Facebook allows them to carry on. Facebook clearly would not want to alienate even more users now, after its Beacon debacle over the past month.

In the Ina Fried blog, you can read about Microsoft current plan to support the new XO from the OLPC project, in this article you can read:

“Microsoft said Wednesday that it is working to develop a version of XP that can run on computers without a hard drive, including the XO computer from One Laptop Per Child.

In a statement, Microsoft said that it will start “limited field trials” of XP running on the OLPC computer in January. If all goes well, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of next year. However, it cautioned folks in North America, particularly those taking part in the Give One, Get One program, that it has no plans to offer that version of XP to folks in the U.S. or Canada.“

AMD’s quad-core Opterons have been notably difficult to find since their introduction two months ago, and there are many reports about a chip-level problem has impacted the supply of these chips to both server OEMs and distribution channel customers.

AMD refer to chip-level problems as errata. Errata are fairly common in microprocessors, though they vary in nature and severity. This particular erratum first became widely known when AMD attributed the delay of the 2.4GHz version of its Phenom desktop processor to the problem. Not much is known about the specifics of the erratum, but it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor’s L3 cache. The erratum can cause a system hang with certain software workloads. The issue occurs very rarely, and thus was not caught by AMD’s usual qualification testing.

An industry source at a tier-two reseller told that the TLB erratum has led to a “stop ship” order on all quad core Opterons. When asked for comment, spokesman Phil Hughes said AMD is shipping quad core Opterons now, but only for “specific customer deals.” Industry sources have suggested to TR that those deals are high-volume situations involving supercomputing clusters. Such customers may run workloads less likely to be affected by any workarounds for the erratum that reduce L3 cache performance, and those customers could potentially consume hundreds of thousands of CPUs. The current availability picture would seem to confirm, that quad-core Opterons are not shipping to OEMs or the channel more generally.

When a Security Strategy Director at Microsoft decided to compare Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities with those of Mozilla Firefox, he may have forgotten that the Head Security Strategist of Mozilla was a former MS employee. In a rebuttal of the study, which finds IE more secure than Firefox, Mozilla said that the number of vulnerabilities publicly acknowledged was just a ’small subset’ of all vulnerabilities fixed internally. The vulnerabilities found internally are fixed in service packs and major updates without public knowledge. ‘For Microsoft this makes sense because these fixes get the benefit of a full test pass which is much more robust for a service pack or major release than it is for a security update. Unfortunately for Microsoft’s users this means they have to wait sometimes a year or more to get the benefit of this work. That’s a lot of time for an attacker to identify the same issue and exploit it to hurt users.’

As part of its ongoing effort to keep a clean index Google is soliciting the help of web browsers to let them know when we find malware in the index (you can read about it in this post). Celebrated Google hacker Johnny Long thinks it’s a good idea, though he told the site Internet News that he doesn’t think it’ll stop real hackers. From the article: ‘Most in search of malware for offensive use know the good stuff — it ain’t distributed through public Web … It’s distributed through dark Web servers, peer-to-peer networks, IRC channels, torrents and the like. Google’s efforts will not affect how skilled hackers get access to malware.’

Firefox 2.0.0.11 has been released, the Release Notes show the only major change as a correction of a compatibility issue with some websites and extensions as discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.10

In SiliconRepublic, you can read today this: "A feature in testing at Google Labs allows users to not only prioritize their favorite results, but also move, ignore, and add search results to personalized records of their preferences. The experiment features a simple ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ option for each search result; users can also suggest a URL that might be more relevant to their query. ‘Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users’ own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it."

Are spammers giving up the game? Google seems to think so. In an article at Wired, Google, ‘… says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year‘. They think their own filters are so good that spammers aren’t even trying anymore. ‘Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.