Apple has more cash than the federal government

 

 Who's ready for iAmerica? As the BBC has reported, the software company Apple has more cash on hand than the United States federal government, according to the company's financial records.
Apple's quarterly financial report shows that the company responsible for the iPad, iPod and the iPhone now has $76.4 billion in reserve cash, while the Treasury Department is sitting on just $73.7 billion.

The feds could probably learn a thing or two from Apple's success. Congress remains embroiled in a debate over spending and whether the federal government, which currently owes trillions in debt, should be allowed to borrow even more. International credit rating agencies have threatened to downgrade the national debt for the first time in the nation's history if Washington doesn't come up with a solution to lift the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling while implementing a concrete plan to get the nation's financial house in order.
Meanwhile, Apple's financial report shows that the company's profits, even through the last recession, are booming.

i cheated myself like I knew I would…I told you I was trouble…

I know many are yet to blog about this heartbreaking event, and scores of people probably have already, but I am sincerely saddened by the passing of arguably one of thee greatest musicians of our time. Amy Winehouse. The name itself has a life of its own, and although the media have created a global image of the deceased star which could easily be misconstrued as much as it is goose-pimple inducing, my sentiments for the eternal Winehouse will forever be laced with a great respect for her as a remarkable artist. I pray that we not forget the magic she spun in songs like You Sent Me Flying and the infectious Rehab (below).
A life lost at the tender ripe age of 27, she goes down in history with other honoured greats like the greatest guitarist of all time, Jimi Hendrix, and first lady of Rock ‘n Roll, Janis Joplin.

Jimi Hendrix

Janis Joplin

Janice Joplin performs one of my favourite Alternative songs, Cry Baby. I love this song mainly for the powerful message it carries (of embracing and not taking for granted where one is and what one has) and the undeniable gritty, passionate performance she gives.

Amy’s first performance at Glastonbury in 2004. She would give her last in 2008.

tooo husky *0*

W.O.W! *gasp* This husky is TOO fierce for words. I feel like I can feel his soul.

Uganda's farmers using odk(open data kit s/w)

It's true! A few hundred "community knowledge workers" are connecting Uganda's farmers with important information, like when to plant crops and how to care for sick animals. It's all done using Android smartphones and the Open Data Kit software, created by researchers at the University of Washington.

That's just one example of the power of open-source software, and an open standard that empowers people around the world.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.


ref-opendatakit.org/blog/page/2/ 

malware explosion due to ladens death

With the biggest news in a decade dominating the Internet, it didn't take long for rogue viruses, Trojans and other malware to mess with computers given the chance.
Web searches and links to a variety of stories — real and fake — about the death of Osama bin Laden are sprouting with all kinds of malicious software as cybercriminals look for a big payday tied to the appetite for news about the Al-Qaida leader's demise.
"The bad guys were quite fast and started to poison searches results in Google Images," said Favio Assolini, a Kaspersky Labs expert on the security software company's blog. "Some of the search results are now leading users to malicious pages." 
As an example, Assolini shared a Google search page with the words "osama bin laden body" typed in the search box. "When clicking an image in the results page, the user will be redirected to one of the malicious domains," antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan/ and pe-antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan/, he said. Both are "offering" a copy of rogueware called "Best Antivirus 2011." And both can bring your computer down.
"When searching, even for images, be careful," Assolini warns.
And the computer programmer quickly becoming known "the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it" even found his own blog server stricken by malicious software.

"It is a good thing my blog server is infected with malware today, I guess :-/" Sohaib Athar said on his Twitter page, after being inundated with questions by journalists and Twitter followers. 
But it is NOT a good thing if you click on Athar's website that's listed on his Twitter page. That's where some malware is sprinkled, and you could get hit.
Christen Gentile of Kaspersky Lab said as Internet users search for bin Laden news, "they should be aware of two new types of scams that are ready and waiting to take advantage of them."
Cybercriminals, Gentile said, have begun search engine optimization efforts, where they "take popular search terms," like bin Laden or anything associated with him or his death, "and use them to direct people to malware ... in popular search engines, trying to lure users to install rogueware."
Search results in Google images have been poisoned, he said. "Some of the search results are leading users to malicious pages. Upon clicking on this search result or image, the user will be redirected to a malicious domain which can infect the user’s computer."
Also, on Facebook, where an "Osama bin Laden is DEAD" page sprouted up, there are some advertising offers celebrating bin Laden's death and offering "free tickets or free sandwiches, in some cases," Gentile said. "By clicking on these ads, users will be redirected multiple times, each time asking for more information, resulting in the potential gathering of email addresses or sensitive information."
For more information on the Facebook scram, check Kaspersky Lab's blog.
SophosLabs has a good guide to help you decide what to do:

• Watch out for the links you're likely to come across in email or on social networking sites offering you additional coverage of this newsworthy event.
• Many of the links you see will be perfectly legitimate links. But at least some are almost certain to be dodgy links, deliberately distributed to trick you into hostile internet territory.
• If in doubt, leave it out!
• Sometimes, poisoned content is rather obvious. The links in this spam captured by SophosLabs, for example, give the impression of going to a news site:

SophosLabs

"If you go to a site expecting to see information on a specific topic but get redirected somewhere unexpected — to a 'click here for a free security scan' page, for instance, or to a survey site, or to a 'download this codec program to view the video' dialog — then get out of there at once. Don't click further. You're being scammed," says SophosLabs' Paul Ducklin on the company's blog.
So be extra careful on the Interwebs today, kids. Don't do what I did — click on a link that I thought was legitimate, only to be hit with a rogue installation of a Windows "Total Security Removal" Trojan that flashed fake security alerts and installed itself on my computer without my permission.
I'm working to get if off the laptop right now, and writing this on another computer. It's a Mac, but from colleague Rosa Golijan's report today, I see that's not safe, either.

Amy Winehouse's musical legacy will live on

 

Shocking death makes it easy to forget how she paved way for artists like Adele

Amy Winehouse, left, may have paved the way for British singers like Adele, right, whose music also dips back into the musical styles of the past.

Linux 3.0 Released; Linus Torvalds Explains Why You Shouldn't Care

The Linux 3.0 kernel was officially pushed out Thursday night, a milestone that even Linus Torvalds says you shouldn't care about.
Torvalds made the announcement Thursday night on Google+, after the release was delayed four days after the discovery of an "incredibly subtle" pathname lookup bug, in Torvalds' words.
But even Torvalds himself said in late May that there was nothing noteworthy about the new release - only that it was designed to approximate the 20th anniversary of his announcement of Linux, which occurred Aug. 25, 1991, via the Usenet bulletin-board system.
"I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0," he wrote in a thread on gmane.org. "It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longe rcomfortably count as high as 40."
"The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and there was a plan to take it up this year too," Torvalds added. "But let's face it - what's the point of being in charge if you can't pick the bike shed color without holding a referendum on it? So I'm just going all alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You'll like it."
So what has changed in Linux 3.0? Torvalds himself has already answered that.
"So what are the big changes?" Torvalds wrote. "NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years") instead."
In early July, another ancient piece of software technology, Java, received its first update in six years, developers announced.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a former writer for eWEEK, notes that the new kernel will include improved support for UEFI, a BIOS replacement for PCs, as well as improvements to the way Xen hypervisors interact with the OS, allowing them to run faster.
The only thing left for Linux devotees to do is start compiling.