Treeduck

contiguous means you are completely connected to something but not like states that are right next door to eachother it means completely connected like the way your butt is connected to your body. and noncontiguous means you are completely unconected to something like 2 objects could not possibly connect in any way. like if you wanted to connect a jelly jar to your butt there is no possible way to do it.

Dell has come up with a novel way to allow customers to pre-order machines with Windows 7.

Under its Windows 7 Free and Easy program, launched on Monday, customers can order a Windows Vista machine now, but elect to have Dell upgrade the PC to Windows 7 before it ships the computer. As a result, customers can order now and get their machine right around the time Windows 7 ships.
It's kind of the reverse of programs that PC makers did after XP could no longer be sold on most new PCs. In that case, computer makers, including Dell, allowed users to order Vista machines that were pre-downgraded to Windows XP.
Dell's latest offer is more about convenience than price. For some time now, those who buy a Vista machine with Home Premium or above have been eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 7. However, that requires a user to sign up and upgrade the machines themselves. The Dell program eliminates that step.
Of course, one could also just wait until October 22 and just get a Windows 7 machine without the semantics. But who likes to wait?

(Credit: CNET News)
Originally posted at Beyond Binary

A federal court on Tuesday reversed an earlier ruling that Microsoft's product activation technology infringed on another company's patent, overturning a $388 million verdict in the case.
In a ruling on Tuesday, the court vacated the earlier decision and decided the case in Microsoft's favor.
"We are pleased that the court has vacated the jury verdict and entered judgment in favor of Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement.
Tuesday's ruling is the latest twist in a case that has had plenty of them. Microsoft initially won a summary judgment ruling, which would have ended the case in its favor, but Uniloc appealed that ruling and a federal appeals court last year ruled that the case needed to go to trial with regard to two counts.
The victory in the Uniloc case comes as Microsoft is awaiting the result of an appeal in another patent case in which the custom XML feature in recent versions of Word was found to infringe on patents held by Canada's I4i. If it fails in its appeal bid, Microsoft faces damages of more than $200 million in that case as well as an injunction that would halt sales of word with the infringing feature.

With the hype around Apple's near-certain upcoming tablet PC seemingly cooling off, our attention now turns to Microsoft--as the company is rumored to be preemptively working on its own Apple-tablet killer.
ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley reports that Microsoft plans to create a tablet, which is based in part on the technology behind the company's Surface project and has been developed under code names including "Oahu" and "Alchemy Ventures." In charge of the project--Chief Experience Officer J Allard, who was the main guy behind the Xbox brand for several years.
But don't look for it any time soon. Mary-Jo says she "wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is waiting for Apple to show its Tablet hand before trotting out its revamped Tablet."
A key difference between a Microsoft tablet and an Apple one would be that Microsoft would design the basic spec, and let hardware partners build the actual devices--allowing MS to sit back and enjoy revenue from Zune-like subscription services, rather than be in the hardware-manufacturing business (and judging from the Xbox 360's high failure rate, that might not be the worst idea).

Like many who spend their days trapped inside a cubicle, Microsoft Office probably dreams of living a more exciting life. Perhaps, when it was just a beta, it thought maybe it would grow up to be a policeman.
Well, in "Crush," a new crime novel, the mundane piece of software gets its chance. Office, or at least one key Office document, ends up playing a central role in the pursuit of a serial killer.
Without giving away too much of the plot, it's fair to say that a certain PowerPoint file becomes a key piece of evidence, with a worker at Microsoft finding central clues within the document's metadata.
"Technology is such a part of my life," the book's author, Alan Jacobson, said in an interview. "It's part of the fabric of my life, so invariably it spills into my writing."

(Credit: Alan Jacobson)
Crush, which went on sale this week, is the follow-up to "The 7th Victim," another book where technology plays an important role. Both feature as the heroine Karen Vail, an FBI profiler who seems to have a knack for attracting murders.
Gadgetry infuses the pages of Crush. While Office has the starring role, a number of products make cameos, including Windows Live, Surface, Outlook and even RoundTable, which Microsoft handed off last year to Polycom. In fact, there were so many Microsoft products, I thought perhaps it was some sort of paid placement.
Jacobson assured me that he's just a fan of Microsoft, whose products he has used for the past 23 years, ever since switching from a Mac Plus to a PC when he opened his chiropractic practice. From then on, he said, he has purchased every version of Word and Office, along with many other of the company's products.
"I really appreciate what Microsoft does," Jacobson said. "They create incredibly complex software that is incredibly easy to use."
I pointed out that it is usually Apple, and not Microsoft, that earns that kind of praise. Jacobson said he is aware but puzzled by that fact. "I am surprised at the animosity that exists on the blogs (toward Microsoft). They write a lot of nasty things."
While nearly all the tech in the book is from Redmond, the main detective does spend lots of time on her BlackBerry (it seems Windows Mobile has a tough time getting market share in the fictional world too).
The Microsoft worker who helps Karen Vail is not a fictional character but rather Tomas Palmer, a real-life program manager in Microsoft's security unit. Jacobson met Palmer through an executive at Microsoft. In part to thank him for his technical assistance, Jacobson decided to have Palmer play a part in the book.

Okay, so we know that Windows’ version of the App Store, called Windows Marketplace, will be available immediately with WinMo 6.5 on October 6. But when will it become available to anyone using WinMo 6.0 or 6.1?

All we knew previously was that it is coming, but unsure when. WM Experts has hunted down a statement from Todd Brix of Microsoft that tells us this particular phase, in which Windows Marketplace will be ready for 6.0/6.1 devices, is called Phase 2 and will be ready in November.

On top of that, we also learned from Brix that Phase 2 will bring “the PC based catalog and shopping experience, user generated app reviews, advanced key-based anti-piracy protection and other enhancements that expand your business opportunity and make it easier for a larger number of customers to find and buy your application.”

Sounds great! I can’t wait to try it out. And I’m sure there are millions of 6.1 users that will be very eager to try it out as well.

via WM Experts

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's best Core i7?
Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.
That's IBM's widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week's Hot Chips conference. But if you're interested, you'd better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn't talking about pricing, but large Power servers can cost more than $10,000 per processor.

IBM's forthcoming Power7 server processor has eight cores, manages 32 threads, and includes 32MB of on-chip embedded DRAM cache. Power7 also has the highest levels of off-chip bandwidth ever achieved by a microprocessor.
(Credit: IBM)
What makes the Power7 so powerful? Each chip has eight cores, and each core supports four-way multithreading. There's 32MB of level-3 cache on the chip, made using embedded DRAM (eDRAM) cells. Most CPUs use SRAM for cache because it's generally easier to combine with high-performance logic, but DRAMs--with only one transistor per bit--offer compelling density advantages. IBM spent years developing a new kind of eDRAM that would work with SOI (silicon on insulator) manufacturing processes, and the Power7 is the most advanced product to use the new technology.
Interestingly, the Power7 cores run much more slowly than those in the Power6 processor, which I wrote about here in 2007 ("Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 1, IBM's Power6"). The Power6 was designed to run very fast using a long CPU pipeline in order to deliver the highest possible performance on each thread of execution.
Maybe that strategy didn't work out as well as IBM hoped, because the Power7 returns to a more traditional microarchitecture with a shorter pipeline and much lower clock rates--though IBM didn't say exactly what those rates would be. (more...)

A federal court on Tuesday reversed an earlier ruling that Microsoft's product activation technology infringed on another company's patent, overturning a $388 million verdict in the case.
In a ruling on Tuesday, the court vacated the earlier decision and decided the case in Microsoft's favor.
"We are pleased that the court has vacated the jury verdict and entered judgment in favor of Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz said in a statement.
Tuesday's ruling is the latest twist in a case that has had plenty of them. Microsoft initially won a summary judgment ruling, which would have ended the case in its favor, but Uniloc appealed that ruling and a federal appeals court last year ruled that the case needed to go to trial with regard to two counts.
The victory in the Uniloc case comes as Microsoft is awaiting the result of an appeal in another patent case in which the custom XML feature in recent versions of Word was found to infringe on patents held by Canada's I4i. If it fails in its appeal bid, Microsoft faces damages of more than $200 million in that case as well as an injunction that would halt sales of word with the infringing feature.

Researchers at security firm Finjan have discovered details of a new type of banking Trojan horse that doesn't just steal your bank log in credentials but actually steals money from your account while you are logged in and displays a fake balance.
The bank Trojan, dubbed URLzone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems which are triggered by unusual transactions, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, said in an interview on Tuesday. For instance, the software is programmed to calculate on-the-fly how much money to steal from an account based on how much money is available.
The specific Trojan Finjan researchers analyzed targets customers of unnamed German banks. It was linked back to a command-and-control server in Ukraine that was used to send instructions to the trojan software sitting infected PCs. Finjan has notified German law enforcement authorities, Ben-Itzhak said.
"It's a next generation bank trojan," he said. "This is part of a new trend of more sophisticated Trojans designed to evade antifraud systems."
Finjan researchers were able to trace the communications from the code on an infected machine back to the command-and-control server, which was left unsecured, according to Ben-Itzhak. On that server, they saw the LuckySploit administration console and were able to see exactly what types of rules the Trojan was written to follow and statistics on victims.
About 90,000 computers visited the sites housing the malware and 6,400 of them were infected, a 7.5 percent success rate, he said. Of those whose computers had the Trojan installed, a few hundred had money stolen from their bank accounts, he added.
During the span of 22 days in mid-August, the criminals behind the Trojan stole the euro equivalent of nearly $438,000, according to the security company.

The Trojan code includes detailed instructions on how the trojan should calculate how much to steal from a victim's bank account.
(Credit: Finjan)
Here's how the trojan works:
Potential victims get their computers infected either by opening an e-mail and clicking on a link to a Web site created to distribute malware or by visiting a site that has been compromised and malware hidden on it.
In this case the malware, a toolkit called LuckySpoilt, exploits a known security hole in the browser, affecting the major browsers, and installs the Trojan on the computer. When the Trojan notices the computer user visiting the site of a targeted bank it springs into action.
While the computer user goes about his or her business on the site, the Trojan looks at the available balance and figures out how much money to steal. The Trojan is given a minimum and a maximum range that is below the amount that triggers antifraud systems and to leave a certain percentage in the account, Ben-Itzhak said.
After performing the calculation, the Trojan then makes the transaction, communicating with the bank site through the browser without the computer user knowing.
"The Trojan is sending requests to the bank and getting replies that your browser doesn't display," Ben-Itzhak said. "You are looking at your account and you don't see any of it."
The Trojan has the money sent to the bank account of a money mule, someone who has an account set up to receive the funds. Money mules are typically people recruited online as "independent contractors" or "financial managers" whose sole purpose is to wire the money placed into their account to someone else, typically out of the country, in exchange for a commission. Because their accounts are used only once or twice, they often do not realize the ruse immediately, Ben-Itzhak said.
Meanwhile, the Trojan hides the theft by erasing it from the report of account activity displayed to the computer user and shows a fake balance--what the amount would be if not for the theft. The victim will not notice something is wrong until a different, uncompromised computer is used to access the account, an ATM is used, or a transaction is denied because of insufficient funds.
The Trojan also keeps a log of the victim's bank account log in credentials, takes screenshots, and snoops on the user's other Web accounts, such as PayPal, Facebook, and Gmail, according to the Finjan report.
This is the first Trojan Finjan has come across that hijacks a victim's browser session, steals the money while the victim is doing online banking, and then covers its tracks by modifying information displayed to the victim, all in real time, Ben-Itzhak said.

Time again for Adobe's annual update of its consumer photo- and video-editing applications, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. We're up to version 8 now, and while there's no killer must-have new capability--unless you consider automatic sync across multiple computers--the two products still provide solid mass-appeal for their respective markets.
As in the past, you can buy the pair together for $149.99, which is a far more attractive buy for video-editing shoppers than photoshoppers, and in fact the combination makes quite a nice bundle for home videographers. Independently, they're $99.99 each. Tack "Plus" to the name of the product for another $40 and you get an extra 20GB on the otherwise free Photoshop.com membership (along with ongoing new template and tutorial content), which will then cost you $50 annually to renew.
The latter becomes key if you plan to take advantage of one of the nicer new features, the ability to sync your videos, photos, music, projects and PDF files across multiple systems using Photoshop.com as the hub. (In case you missed it, Photoshop.com rolled out video support last month in preparation for this release of Pre.) While Adobe doesn't make a Plus membership a requirement for doing so, you'll very quickly max out your free 2GB without it.
After allowing the product to languish for a while, with 8 Adobe brings the Mac version of Photoshop Elements up to parity with the Windows version and with the buzzy new features in iPhoto, including face recognition and geotagging/mapping. Unlike iPhoto, however, there's no direct upload to Facebook, though it supports a broader number of services, including Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Smugmug. Annoyingly, those choices are buried as More Options on the Share pane (likely because the interface decision was based on the technology used--implemented via an API rather than core program code--rather than where the user will look for them).
Like most current facial recognition implementations, Adobe's is only moderately accurate. For instance, in many photos it correctly one person, but didn't detect others and thought inanimate objects were faces The batch detection and labeling where you confirm different faces in groups of selected images is better, but still a little clunky.
PSE also includes a version of Photoshop CS4's Content Aware Scaling, Adobe's implementation of seam-carving technology, called Recompose. Recompose sort of lets you selectively drop objects from a photo as you scale it down, preserving those elements that you designate as worth keeping.
Now that Adobe includes the Organizer with both products, it's been updated to handle video and audio files rather than just stills, which is nice, especially for Premiere Elements users. There's some more "Smarts' in the latest version of Premiere: SmartFix, which makes adjustments to perceived flaws detected by the Auto Analyzer (a feature introduced in the last version which parses and tags files for problems with shake, exposure, focus and so on); Smart Trim, which extracts clips based on similarly derived information; and SmartMix, which automatically fades voice and background audio tracks in and out depending upon your prioritization. If you want to take some creative risks, you can use the Motion Tracking, which lets you sync effects, text, or graphics to objects in a scene, or Effects Masking, which applies effects only to specific rectangular selections. (Unfortunately, I ran into technical difficulties with mix 'n' match betas on my system that prevented several features from working when I tried to create the walkthrough for Premiere.)
I'm reserving judgment on performance, stability and quality of results (especially on Photoshop Elements' tricky Recompose tool) until I have final versions of the software. Since it's shipping now, that should be soon.