Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Yay! They lost their Nasdaq listing!

Embattled vendor SCO Group dumped by NASDAQ

“A lost legal struggle with Linux distributor Novell, an apparently truncated fight with IBM, a bankruptcy filing in September…and now, a NASDAQ delisting. Is there any hope at all left for floundering PC Unix vendor SCO? The long embattled PC Unix vendor SCO has finally gotten the heave-ho from NASDAQ, some two months after filing for bankruptcy and three months after losing a crucial legal copyright struggle with Novell, a company that’s morphed over the years into a major distributor of Linux, a competing breed of Unix software that also runs on PCs.”

Ya-ha-ha! (Gloating ensues.)

Dewd! This is cool! Scientists have found a galaxy that is blasting it’s neighboring galaxy with death rays! Rock on!

“Death Star” Galaxy Found Blasting Smaller Neighbor

“The supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting a smaller neighbor with a violent energy jet—earning it the moniker the “Death Star” galaxy—scientists announced today. The jet has probably fried the atmospheres of any planets in the way, researchers added. But the never-before-seen display may also one day lead to a new burst of star and planet formation. And it may help unravel the many mysteries about how such jets form, how they work, and how they evolve, experts said. ‘The origin, propagation, and energy dissipation of jets are among the most important unsolved problems in modern astrophysics,’ said lead study author Daniel Evans of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Dewd! 10 years since the term “blogging” was coined… and now, we use it all the time! (OK, well, I do!)

Blogging celebrates its tenth birthday

“Happy blog-a-versary! Today is the tenth anniversary of the coining of the term that makes some of us giddy and others recoil in horror: blogging. If you subscribe to the view that says the term was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997, today’s the day. It was on that day that he combined the word “web” and “log” to describe his personal journal online, according to blogging lore. Back then, the number of blogs on the web varied, with some citing numbers in the mere double digits. The trend has exploded since then, with new blogs coming online every day.”

Can Microsoft be any lamer? Their “amazing, new” Vista operating system has been widely dissed by users, many of whom have opted to go back to Windows XP… now M$ is coming out with Vista Service Pack 1, which has over 300 fixes… and requires an arduous process involving three reboots! Funny, you can upgrade Ubuntu with only one or two mouse clicks!

Windows Vista SP1 Includes More Than 300 Hot Fixes

“Microsoft has released a detailed roster of the contents of its forthcoming service pack for Windows Vista, and the list includes more than 300 hot fixes covering everything from data protection to video performance. The list, recently posted on Microsoft’s Web site, can be downloaded as a 47-page document that the company says is not exhaustive. Microsoft plans to add more fixes and patches to Windows Vista SP1 before a final version is released to the public early next year. For now, Vista users can entertain themselves by poring over the hundreds of updates that Microsoft says will be part of SP1. Among them: a fix for a problem in which optical disks turn blank after being formatted with Vista’s Live File System; a patch for a glitch that generates an error message when large files are copied from one Vista-based computer to another over a network; and an update designed to improve Vista’s speed when its operating on a computer linked to a virtual private network. Other updates are meant to improve Internet Explorer’s streaming video performance and prevent data loss in USB devices connected to Vista PCs. There’s also a fix that adds a Venezuelan time zone. Microsoft said some of the fixes detailed in the list are already available to the public as individual downloads, while others will only be released as part of the final version of Vista SP1. Unfortunately for some Vista users — especially those running custom business apps — the service pack will not fix some application compatibility problems that affect the current version of Vista.”

I bet that you knew that from personal experience. Unlike John C. Dvorak, who “get’s no spam,” most of us do! My spam filters are pretty good, and they eliminate tons of the hateful stuff… but some still gets through. Spammers should be shot!

Study: The Internet’s spam problem is getting worse

“A study finds that only one out of every 20 e-mails is from a legitimate source, and business professionals now rate it the top form of junk advertising. Barracuda Networks found that nearly 95 percent of all e-mail sent today is spam. This is up from just five percent of all e-mail in 2001, and 85 to 90 percent of e-mail in 2006. The company’s study found that 65 percent of respondents receive 10 or fewer spams per day, and half receive five or fewer. A little more than one in ten respondents reported receiving as many as 50 or more unsolicited messages daily. In 2007, spammers seemed to favor the use of attachments, a change from last year where inline image and botnet spam seemed to be popular. Additionally, techniques used by spammers have become more complex, which make them harder to stop and harder to track. For now at least, the relentless battle against what has probably become one of the biggest scourges of the Internet seems to a losing one. Security vendors are now being forced to watch new spam mails continuously for potential malware and security concerns. This increased vigilance does have a positive. ‘[Continous monitoring and defense] can block a new spam attack within minutes of its start, virtually at zero hour,’ Barracuda president and CEO Dean Drako said. Among business professionals, over half — 57 percent — consider spam e-mail as the worst form of junk advertising. This easily eclipsed junk postal mail at 31 percent, and telemarketing at 12 percent.”

Will Japan increase it’s declining citizenry with humans or robots? Some seem to prefer the latter!

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto

“General Motors introduced the first industrial robots in 1961. Since then, Japan’s largest companies have competed to make robots as human as possible. On December 6th Toyota went one step further. After showing off a white android that played a meek rendition of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on the violin, Toyota’s boss, Katsuaki Watanabe, announced that the company would make electro-mechanical critters a core business. Four areas look promising: nursing, cleaning homes, manufacturing and ferrying people short distances (in a sort of automatic wheelchair)… Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer, famously created the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ which defined the primacy of man relative to machine. Robots may not injure humans, must obey them, and must protect themselves without violating the first two rules. These sound minatory, but as Japan’s population starts to decline due to the low birth-rate, and its number of elderly swell, robots are seen as a solution.”

The word is, of course, “w00t.” (Spelled with two zeroes.) Check out this interesting article:

“w00t” crowned word of year by U.S. dictionary

“‘w00t,’ an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said ‘w00t’ — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging. It’s like saying ‘yay,’ the dictionary said. ‘It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,’ Merriam-Webster said. Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers. Runner-up was ‘facebook’ as a new verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site. Merriam-Webster President John Morse said ‘w00t’ reflected the growing use of numeric keyboards to type words. ‘People look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A,’ he said. ‘This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character.'”

You want to share a file, so you upload it to Microsoft’s FolderShare Site… and, under certain conditions… poof! It deletes the file instead of sharing it! So, the biggest, richest computer software company in the world, deletes your files due to a bug! So, you gotta love the irony of that!

Microsoft bug deletes files instead of sharing them

“The company’s FolderShare application is intended to allow customers to synchronize files across multiple machines, but a bug has ended up deleting them. According to a statement from Microsoft sent to users of the service, an issue with FolderShare deleted files that contained special characters, such as trademark signs, accents and tildas, and the like. The company has asked that users do not empty their FolderShare trash folders until they have verified they had not been affected by the issue. The problem occurred over a three day period from December 3 to 6, it said. Microsoft said it had fixed the issue, however it wanted to alert users to the problem to prevent any lost data. In some cases, the folder containing the files may have been deleted as well, and the company said affected users would have to recreate that folder.”