Windows Server 2008 Users Say They’re On A Roll

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 officially ships today, but early adopters are already running it in production networks and reporting solid results with new features, including everything from stretched clusters to workload-specific configurations of the server.

“Every one of our organizations is having the conversation about rolling out 2008 or deploying Windows Server 2003,” said Rand Morimoto, a consultant at Convergent Corp., which helps companies design and build local, wide-area and enterprise networks. “If they think 2008 is dependable and reliable, we roll it out. And we have installed hundreds of these servers in production environments.”

While early adopters are reporting success with their deployments, a recent survey by CDW Corp. showed that security, setup and configuration improvements, and virtualization were key benefits identified by the 772 IT respondents from small business, medium/large businesses, state/local governments, higher education and K-12 education.

News Source: ComputerWorld
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Corsair Announces 4x Faster Flash Drive

Corsair announced today its new 16GB Voyager “GT” USB 2.0 flash drive that will be showing at CeBIT next week in Hanover, Germany.

The company typically markets its devices as more rugged than other removable memory devices, with its Survivor line designed to even be water resistant to 200 meters. But the GT is instead shown off for its transfer speeds.

The GT promises speeds up to four times faster than “average USB” devices, according to Corsair, claiming a 1.06 MB office file takes less than 2 seconds , 270 MB worth of pictures takes 24 seconds, and a 1.63 GB movie takes 98 seconds.

News Source: BetaNews
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Yahoo Launches Buzz

Yahoo has added a Digg ‘kind of a’ functionality to its site that will help highlight popular news, articles & blog posts. This will be based on Search Patterns & User Votes. The Yahoo Buzz extension counts the ‘BuzzScore’ for news stories, videos, images and blog posts. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more. Content with the most votes is then considered for placement on Yahoo.com. “Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers,” said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division.

News Source: Neowin
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PayPal Warns: Steer Clear Of Apple’s Safari Browser

If you’re using Apple’s Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.

Safari doesn’t make PayPal’s list of recommended browsers because it doesn’t have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer.

“Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers,” Barrett said in an interview. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

News Source: InfoWorld
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RVM Integrator 1.5 Final

RVM Integrator is not just an integrator. It´s main purpose is to actually slipstream hotfixes and third party utilities into your Windows install disks. Integrating is simply a way to attatch setup files into your windows disk and have them install at a specific moment during Windows setup. Slipstreaming will actually overwrite older files and place itself directly into the windows installation.

News Source: Major Geeks
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Attackers Harvest FTP Credentials With New Crimeware Toolkit

Securiity researchers discovered that new malicious code spread through the black market is making its way onto some of the largest corporate Web sites in the world.

San Jose-based Finjan, a security company specializing in Web gateway solutions, announced today that it uncovered a database containing more than 8,700 harvested FTP account credentials, including usernames, passwords and server addresses, spread through a malicious toolkit, which cyber criminals use to harvest the information.

The information was available for blackmarket trade, along with the NeoSploit version 2 crimeware toolkit, a malicious application specifically designed to abuse and trade stolen FTP account credentials from numerous legitimate companies. The malware is subsequently distributed to other criminals who use the malicious code on high traffic Web sites for their own financial gain.

News Source: CRN
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Firefox 3 Performance Gets A Boost

Now that Firefox 3 is approaching the home stretch it is important that Mozilla starts to throw in performance improvements to really make the browser purr. Over in our forum xpgeek pointed out that a Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) build of Firefox 3 had been created which greatly improved the performance of JavaScript in the browser. While PGO itself hasn’t yet landed in the nightly builds there have been some significant improvements to the JavaScript engine.

I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top.

News Source: CyberNet
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Intel Unveils New 45nm Processors And Chipset

Intel Corp. Wednesday unveiled five new processors and a chipset for the embedded market.

The quad-core and dual-core Xeon processors are being built with the company’s new 45 nanometer (nm) process and will take advantage of Intel’s new transistor design.

At the same time, Intel announced that it will extend life cycle support for the new processors to seven years from the traditional five years.

News Source: PC World
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Microsoft Chops Vista Retail Prices

In what may be an unprecedented decision, Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to lower the retail prices for several flavors of Windows Vista.

For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista, and only for the upgrade version used to move from an earlier copy of Vista. The suggested price for Vista Ultimate drops to $219 from $299, while Home Premium falls to $129, from $159.

Other developed markets will also see price cuts, while in emerging markets, Microsoft is eliminating the distinction between full and upgrade versions of Home Basic and Home Premium as it attempts to convince more users there to use genuine software.

Analysts were surprised by Microsoft’s move.

News Source: C|Net News
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Dutch Boffin Calls RIAA Expert ‘Borderline Incompetent’

One of the world’s top experts in the science of P2P file sharing has offered his harsh evaluation of the RIAA’s so-called expert witness report.

With what can only be described as a good dose of Dutch courage, Delft University’s Assistant Professor Johan Pouwelse, dealt a devastating thump on the head to the music industry when he labeled the RIAA’s super expert, Dr Doug Jacobson’s report as ‘borderline incompetent’.

Prof. Pouwelse is the same bloke who stopped the Dutch equivalent of the RIAA dead in their tracks back in 2005. In the UMG v Lindor trial, the RIAA claimed it had carried out its analysis with sophisticatedly advanced equipment and software which, it assured everyone, was never, ever mistaken.

News Source: The Inquirer
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