CarneyWeb sure looks a whole lot different than it did a year ago!

What do you think of the improvement?

When was the last time you remember a technology company doing that?

The widely anticipated update to Apple Computer’s Mac OS X will appear earlier than expected, sources say, which is good news for the company in a tough year.

Not just for the company, but for all computer users. OSX is quite simply a brilliant operating system. With each improvement, Apple goes down its asymtotic curve towards total bliss.

Hopefully, the judge won’t wimp out.

In a move that could bring Microsoft and the Justice Department closer to an approved settlement deal, a federal judge said Tuesday that both parties had complied with laws governing antitrust settlements.

How I long for the days of the real trust busters.

The plaintiff states are seeking for Microsoft to: sell a second version of Windows, from which middleware such as browsers and media players can be removed; license through auction its widespread Office software for use on competing operating systems; give away for free the source code, or blueprint, to its Internet Explorer Web browser; and carry in Windows for 10 years Sun Microsystems’ version of the Java Virtual Machine.

Unfortunately, this is only a baby step in the right direction. None of these actions are punative enough, and neither will they solve the core problem: that Microsoft is a predatory company with too much power because of its de-facto monopoly in the operating system market in conjunction with its de-facto monopoly in office productivity software. These two items must be separated for any true resolution to take place.

Moriarty from [[Ain’t it Cool News]] gives his thoughts on the latest in the long dead series.

I could go on, but I don’t have the heart. Suffice it to say that I hated this film, and I strongly urge you not to see it in the theater. Send the message to Dimension that you want them to STOP… RAPING… THE CORPSE… OF HALLOWEEN…

There was an exponential drop off in quality in these films, which means that eventhough the first one is a classic, the second is only mediocre. Anything after that is just a waste of celluloid and money.

The vulerability recently found in apache turns out to be not very vulnerable after all.

A program designed to infect vulnerable computers running the open-source Apache Web server application apparently hasn’t made it very far, security experts said Monday.

A quick thought… if this had been IIS, every machine on the planet would have been infected by now, and providers such as AT&T would have disabled port 80 (remember CODE RED?).

It’s about time somebody realized that the party is over!

Three years after Napster unleashed the first wave of music-trading over the Internet — and a full year after the company was shut down by a court order — the labels are coming to terms with the notion that Internet file-sharing is reshaping their business, and they must compete with piracy or risk losing a generation of customers.

From the first moment I saw Napster, I knew that the record industry was going to have to dramatically reshape itself if it was going to survive. It seems as though the studios have finally realized this!

Let’s hope Apple can make this work!

Apple today announced that it has begun shipping the company’s first rackmount server, the Xserve. Introduced in May, Apple said they have received over 4,000 orders for the product to date….
According to Apple, industry standard test shows the Xserve out-performed similarly configured severs from Dell, IBM and Sun.

It’s the rackmount server for the rest of us [[:-)]]

A new worm is starting to spread

Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven’t had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

Just a quick note for those of you that think this points out a problem in the open source universe. Quite the opposite is true. Note that the flaw was discovered only two weeks ago and a solution was quickly provided so that only a few servers have been infected.

Do you think Microsoft would respond as quickly?

Brazil is the NY Yankees of world football!

As European giants Germany controlled much of the final, the Mannschaft always lacked that little, extra bit of magic. Brazil though, the modern heirs of yesteryear’s most romantic footballers and kings, had all the wizardry one could hope for. The final proved a battle of German efficiency and resiliency against Brazilian creativity and individual brilliance.

Congratulations Brazil!

Xerox follows Enron and Worldcom.

The wildfire of accounting controversies engulfing Enron Corp. and tech-sector companies such as WorldCom Inc. is scorching another company. According to a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal, Xerox Corp. could have to restate its 1997 to 2001 earnings to the tune of more than US$6 billion.

Is this going to take us into another great depression? Will the American public be able to look past the dishonesty of the (hopefully) few?