icrosoft have announced that Windows 2000 users are exposed to hijacking. According to the BBC, “A vulnerability was also found in the Print Spooler service and the Plug and Play (PnP) hardware detection feature in Windows, both of which could leave systems open to attack and vulnerable to remote control.” XP Service Pack 2 is said to have simplified the process of patching up the operating system. The remainder of Windows users are advised to “sit up, listen and take action.”

ollowing rumours and an official announcement in the Google Blog, feeds are available for news items over at Google. Perhaps this takes us one step closer to full support for SERP RSS feeds (top 10 search results delivered to your feeds aggregator). Google News results can currently be delivered as RSS or Atom feeds. They are composed of items from a specific section (topic) or news returned for a given search term/s.

This move can certainly make Google Alerts for news obsolete, yet such alerts for non-news searches remain practical, albeit difficult to handle (periodical HTML-formatted E-mails).

Ben Hammersley (c/f: Keeping Track of Google, Google Results as RSS Feeds) has devised a workaround which enables you to get results as RSS feeds for standard Web searches at Google. Be warned that scraping is possibly involved, so the technique is questionable.

Yahoo have been offering news RSS feeds for quite some time. This has been very useful when tracking particular terms, so I am convinced Google will benefit from their recent decision (or implementation).

The iPod has gone up to their heads

Nominet have made some controversial decisions in the past. I discussed one such decision back in March this year (see Re: Domain extensions). For those who haven’t the patience to read the whole thread, the conversations led to the following article from the Register:

Apple has been awarded control of the domain iTunes.co.uk, even though it was registered before the Mac maker announced its online music service.

Just as I thought that the story ground to a halt, I noticed the following story on the BBC this morning.

Mr Cohen is contesting Nominet’s decision in March to take itunes.co.uk from him and hand it over to Apple.

He told the BBC News website he is planning to continue to fight for the web address.

Talk about outrageous misuse of power by large bodies and corporations…

Getting a higher level of expressiveness using a CLI

In a very recent item from Slashdot:

“According to Stephen Toulouse at Microsoft (rel="nofollow"), because of the possible virus threat that targets Monad the shell will not be included in Windows Vista. CNet is reporting that, even though Monad is not to be included on Vista, it will be included on a major server operating system for servers from Microsoft. Codenamed Longhorn server, that edition is due out by 2007.”

The inclusion of a CLI is primarily aimed at programmers, system administrators and Web hosts who require versatile remote access. I have some suspicion that Monad will introduce users to the power of the command-line¹, who will in turn realise that they can get it all under Linux without the high costs which Windows entails. In the past few days I converted about 3 people from Windows to Linux, which results in a rewarding feeling. It is not a religious war, but one of freedom. Free as in free beer. Free as in freedom.

¹ The “front line”, not MS-DOS, but bash et al. rather.

Would you believe that a base unit with a monitor can be sold for as little as $225? Although there is no mentioning of the O/S and software that is included, buyers can get it all for a mere pittance in India. There are some amazing offers in westernised countries as well. In the UK, for example, a Linux box can be as cheap as 140 pounds ($247) plus tax, albeit it does not include a monitor. From the article in the BBC:

India’s first low-cost personal computer has been launched in the Tamil Nadu state capital, Madras.

Designed by IT firm HCL Infosystems, it is priced at 9,990 rupees ($225) and includes all the basic features required for a first-time user.

There is no mentioning of which operating system is used; the acronym PC is no indicator either.

he media has become fascinated with the discovery of a new planet that orbits our Sun. It is rare for main-stream media to be fascinated by astronomy, so this news is rather major.

That planet, which is the 10^th in the solar system, is larger then Pluto that was discovered decades ago. Put in the words of the article from my favourite (syndicted) source of astronomy news:

Astronomers have discovered a new planet orbiting our Sun, which is larger than Pluto. It’s located 97 times further than the Earth from the Sun. This new, 10th planet was actually first photographed in 2003 by the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory, but it took this long to study and confirm its size and orbit. A name has been proposed to the International Astronomical Union, which is making its decision.

intendo’s profits are down by nearly 80% so worries about Nintendo’s vocation begin to resurface. The giant game maker has high sentimental value to many, including myself. Above is a screenshot that I took weeks ago while playing the classis Mario series from Nintendo.

Returning to the dysphoric news:

Reuters Japan passes on word from Nintendo of a 78.5% reduction in operating profits for the quarter ending June 30. Speculation from the news service on the reason for the drop makes perfect sense – the GameCube doesn’t have enough exclusives, first-party and third-party, and sales of GBA SP and GameCube have been declining.