Galbraith's Law of Prominence Getting on the cover of "Time" guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.
A couple of news items.
As you all know, the XBOX 360 is to be launched in a week. So how popular is it? Is it worth spending the $300 (~ 13000 Rs) on it? Or is it better to wait for a while to let games mature out?
CNN
has reviewed the XBOX 360. Summed up - it is
Good, but not great. What they mean is that the release games do not make the console interesting enough to dunk a huge sum of money into it.
Yahoo
says Dont buy the XBOX.
In related news, Microsoft's competitor in this, Sony, seems to have
committed a big blunder in manipulating computer systems for enforcing copyright protection. And also for lambasting the public as very ignorant.
Wired has a story on what the rootkit actually is, and how it hides from you. To summarize, Sony released
a number of albums with this copy protection, which does stuff apart from what is mentioned in the EULA, and makes the computer prone to certain types of worms. When this was discovered, Sony released some updates which didnt actually remove the protection tool, and actually worsened the problem, making the computer even more vulnerable. To cover it up, they even accuse the public of being very ignorant and stupid when it comes to anything about computers. Finally, in the light of all the recent litigations against it, and the bad press, Sony
recalls all the infected CD's.
For the more technically minded, the
articles by Mark Russinovich of
SysInternals who actually discovered this vulnerability, are very good read. They contain a lot of information on what rootkits are and how this particular one works, and the dangers of removing it improperly.
