Of all the ware Microsoft churns out from its sweatshop of “lightning bolt, lightning bolt” nerds, Windows is the one most inexorably tied to the public image of the company. Although we agree that Vista could have used a bit more time shoved back into the silicon womb for some feature buffing and bug fixing, it’s not nearly as bad as people say.

Like I said, even if they outsell every other computer manufacturer in the world, their market share for their OS will never be over 30%, putting windows market share at approx. 70%. Sure they will become more susceptible to viruses the…

… good news is that based on the nature of the vulnerability the risk is low, but the bad news is that this kind of attack could become more serious. two ways to protect yourself until Apple releases an update. First, you can change the permissions of ARDAgent by opening Terminal and entering the following (all on one line) …

I almost avoided writing this story since I hate to add to the hype of low-risk threats like this. While I don't doubt for a second that we'll see serious Mac (and iPhone) security threats in the future, this one is pretty low…

It’s uncomfortable when this should be the main priority!

Time is round. Space is curved. Why should your mouse be linear? Plenty of applications require you to do more than scroll up and down. Mighty Mouse offers 360-degree scrolling capability, thanks to its Scroll Ball, perfectly positioned to…

The history of computing spans thousands of years - from the primitive notched bones found in Africa, to the invention of abacus in 2400 BC, to Charles Babbages Difference Engine in 1883, to the rise of the popularity of Personal Computers (PCs) in the 1970s.

In their history of the ENIAC computer, Alice R. Burks and Arthur W. Burks summarize the Atanasoff achievement as follows: “He invented a new type of a serial storage module, applicable to digital electronic computing. He formulated,…

Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware (the chipset and other tidbits) and tries to get the CPU running.

There’s a complication worth mentioning (aka, I told you this thing is hacky). The image for a current Linux kernel, even compressed, does not fit into the 640K of RAM available in real mode. My vanilla Ubuntu kernel is 1.7 MB…

Apple is about to kick off the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference with their Keynote speech. Live Keynote coverage will be provided at MacRumorsLive.com. iPhone users can visit MacRumorsLive and will be redirected to a specially formatted site.

We will be providing live coverage of Steve Job's Keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 10am PDT (UTC - 7).

10 free handy Leopard applications to make your life easier…

This is the ultimate torrent downloader for mac, in my opinion, far more efficient than Azureus. You can set it to watch a folder (e.g. downloads) and then add torrents automatically as they are downloaded. No sooner have you clicked in FF…

Babbage had already received funding from Parliament to build a “difference engine” that could do mathematical calculations. While that project was still unfinished, he conceived in 1834 a new and broader idea: an “analytical engine” that “could not only foresee but could act on that foresight.”

Ada was 15 when she met the Cambridge mathematics professor Babbage 175 years ago today. Babbage had already received funding from Parliament to build a “difference engine” that could do mathematical calculations. While that project was…

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced, but since its release in 1992, it's become virtually extinct. It's a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival interviews with key players. We've tracked down and digitized all five parts

100 years later, German engineer Konrad Zuse built the Z1, the first functional general-purpose computer, using binary counting with mechanical telephone relays. During World War II, Zuse wanted to switch to vacuum tubes, but Hitler killed the…

A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.

The Burnt Pancake Problem works like this: Imagine you are a diner owner. To promote your delicious fare, you want to create a golden pyramid of pancakes. Using a spatula, you have to rearrange an existing stack of different-sized pancakes,…

Help make a Guinness World Record By Downloading Firefox 3 within 24hrs of its release!

Select a country Select a country Afghanistan Aland Islands Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua And Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda…

Here you can browse the source code and manuals of various old versions of UNIX. For every file, you can also find related files from other versions: this can help show how the different versions of UNIX are related.

At present, this is a prototype and I have only made the following releases available to test the prototype. When it all works properly, I will add most of the Unix versions in the Unix Archive into the tree. The 1970s

OLPC founder Nick Negroponte just unveiled the next-gen XO Laptop, and it totally blows the original away. Smaller and more like a foldable book, it does away with the keyboard and trackpad to go totally touchscreen?that’s right, dual touchscreens, straight out of the future, like a kid’s book in Minority Report.

Enhanced Book Experience - Dual-touch sensitive displays will be used to enhance the e-book experience, with a dual-mode display similar to the current XO laptop. The design provides a right and left page in vertical format, a…

Linus Torvalds tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon for open source software by the end of the decade.

This video was put together by the folks at the Computer History Museum who kindly gave us permission to share this video with Linux Journal readers. http://www.computerhistory.org __________________________ Carlie Fairchild is the publisher of…