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HP

Submission + - Ex-Board Member: HP Committing Corporate Suicide 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If Apple's looking for a seamless transition, advises the NYT's James B. Stewart, it definitely shouldn't look to Hewlett Packard. In the year after HP CEO Mark Hurd was told to hit-the-road-Jack, HP — led by new CEO Leo Apotheker — has embarked on a stunning shift in strategy that has left many baffled and resulted in HP's fall from Wall Street grace (its stock declined 49%). The apparent new focus on going head-to-head with SAP (Apotheker's former employer) and Oracle (Hurd's new employer) in enterprise software while ignoring the company's traditional strengths, said a software exec, is 'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes.' Former HP Director Tom Perkins said, 'I didn't know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.' A year ago, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fired off an e-mail to the NY Times calling buddy Hurd's ouster 'the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs.' Most dismissed Ellison's rant as hyperbole at the time, writes Stewart, but now many aren't so sure.
Security

Submission + - New Worm Morto Using RDP to Infect Windows PCs (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A new worm called Morto has begun making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days, infecting machines via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). The worm is generating a large amount of outbound RDP traffic on networks that have infected machines, and Morto is capable of compromising both servers and workstations running Windows.

Users who have seen Morto infections are reporting in Windows help forums that the worm is infecting machines that are completely patched and are running clean installations of Windows Server 2003.

Submission + - 'Leap seconds' may be eliminated from UTC (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Since their introduction in 1971, leap seconds have proved problematic for at least a few software programs. The leap second added on to the end of 2008, for instance, caused Oracle cluster software to reboot unexpectedly in some cases."
Science

Submission + - The strange case of solar flares and radioactive e (physorg.com)

Submitted by
DarkKnightRadick
DarkKnightRadick writes: "The case for radioactive decay has been challenged, by of all sources, the sun itself. According to the article:
"On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare."
This is important because the rate of decay is very important not just for antique dating, but also for cancer treatment, time keeping, and the generation of random numbers. This isn't a one time measurement, either.
"Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.""
Security

Submission + - Windows DLL Vulnerability Exploit In The Wild (computerworld.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: Exploit code for the DLL loading issue that reportedly affects hundreds of Windows applications made its appearance on Monday. HD Moore, the creator of the Metasploit open-source hacking toolkit, released the exploit code along with an auditing tool that records which applications are vulnerable. "Once it makes it into Metasploit, it doesn't take much more to execute an attack," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security. "The hard part has already been done for [hackers]."

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 356

by riffer (#31081394) Attached to: The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals
It's a big deal because it's fundamentally insane to write 200KB of code to do an EULA. Especially for the COMMAND-LINE ONLY tools. It defies all sense of rationality and common-sense. A cavalier attitude of "oh it's no big deal to make programs bigger nowadays" is the reason why Windows 7 is a fucking resource pig compared to Linux. And frankly, Linux is a pig when you look at heavily optimized, lightweight OS's like QNX. Er... sorry... rant mode off.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 356

by riffer (#31080020) Attached to: The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals
I wouldn't be surprised if there's hundreds more.... Only reason I don't post the mirror is because a) I don't want to be sued by MS and 2) I respect Mark's choice. He certainly deserves big compensation for the amazing work he's done with SysInternals.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 2) 356

by riffer (#31078638) Attached to: The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals
Yeah, me too. I was horrified. In fact, as soon as I read that Mark was going to the dark side, I did a full rip of the entire SysInternals website, just to make sure I'd have an untainted copy of all his wonderful, useful Windows tools. I was very glad I did that when I saw Microsoft freaking triple the size of some of the binaries...

Comment Re:Summary not quite right... (Score 1) 477

by riffer (#28725239) Attached to: US Postal Service Moves To GNU/Linux
HP has an exclusive hardware contract with USPS for Intel-based servers, workstations and such. And for monitors. So all the Wintel servers are HP.
Still outnumbered by huge farm sof Solaris servers.
As for IFL, here's IBM's description of it.

And yeah, the GCN article sucks ass, but then journalists are pretty much computer illiterate and it doesn't help that they talk to managers and not the actual engineers.

Comment Article is inaccurate (Score 1) 477

by riffer (#28725093) Attached to: US Postal Service Moves To GNU/Linux
The GCN article this is based on has many significant factual errors. HP is not really involved. The migration is to IBM's ZLinux, which is SuSE Linux running on the Z-Os platform, as virtual servers. Hewlett-Packard has nothing to do with it other than managing hardware. It certainly isn't "HP Linux". The number of servers quoted is not how many are used for tracking. More like the total number being migrated. Sadly, the part about the COBOL stuff is true, though only chunks of the app were written in COBOL (i.e. those that ran on the mainframes). Mostly it's the stuff that relates to finances, not surprisingly.
Linux Business

US Postal Service Moves To GNU/Linux 477

Posted by kdawson from the cobol-package-management dept.
twitter writes "The US Postal Service has moved its Cobol package tracking software to HP machines running GNU/Linux. 1,300 servers handle 40 million transactions a day and cost less than the last system, which was based on a Sun Solaris environment." The migration took a year. The USPS isn't spelling how big the savings are, except that they are "significant."
Data Storage

Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years 395

Posted by Zonk from the lot-of-pr0n dept.
Ralph_19 writes "Wired visited Seagate's R&D labs and learned we can expect 3.5-inch 300-terabit hard drives within a matter of years. Currently Seagate is using perpendicular recording but in the next decade we can expect heat-assisted magnetic recording (HARM), which will boost storage densities to as much as 50 terabits per square inch. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum." In the meantime, Hitachi is shipping a 1 TB HDD sometime this year. It is expected to retail for $399.
Security

Submission + - FCC Meets to Investigate Cookie Abuse

Submitted by PreacherTom
PreacherTom writes: Online advertisers have a sweet tooth for cookies. Not the kind you bake, but the digital kind — those tiny files that embed themselves on a PC and keep tabs on what Web sites are visited on which machines. But cookies could have a bad aftertaste for consumers. Privacy advocates say the files are being force fed in large quantities to computer users, and they're demanding that the government put some advertisers on a diet. On Nov. 17, representatives from the Center for Digital Democracy plan to meet with the Federal Trade Commission to discuss what they believe is the abuse of what are known as behaviorally targeted advertising techniques, since certain cookies collect enough information that over time users' identities can become evident.

Feed Fly Silent, Fly Cheap (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an integrated wing-body concept aircraft that's quieter and more fuel efficient than anything aloft today. Here's why you won't be boarding it any time soon. By Dave Demerjian.


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