Tech News

Noooo…Microsoft has set its sight on developing a search engine that will surpass google. Poor google will never stand a chance. :( CNN article.

Chairman Bill Gates, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and a handful of other executives sat down in February to answer a question asked countless times before in the world’s largest software maker’s 28-year history. Should Microsoft build or buy?

What they decided was to build technology that would eventually surpass Google Inc.’s ability to sift through the Web and return results relevant enough to make it the top Internet search destination.

I guess Microsoft starting to INVENT things themselves instead of just buying up all the smaller companies is a good thing, still…google…

New worm targets Internet Explorer. CNN article.

The worm, dubbed “Swen” or “Gibe,” takes advantage of a two-year-old hole in Internet Explorer and affects systems that have not installed a patch for that security hole, according to Internet security company Network Associates Inc..

The malicious program arrives as an attachment to an e-mail pretending to contain a patch for holes in Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express and then mails itself off to addresses located on the victim’s computer.

Sigh…once again the anti-virus company game the worm different names, just like Blaster.D, aka Nachia, aka Wenchia. I’m thinking they need a centralised database for virus naming…

The worm also can spread over Internet relay chat and the Kazaa peer-to-peer network, as well as copy itself over shared networks, Network Associates said.

Well, no SHIT Sherlock. A virus is just a fricking FILE, of course it can spread through IRC’s file sending and a P2P file-sharing network.

And finally: Harddisk makers sued for false advertising. Reuters article.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world’s biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.

For those who are confused, this is how harddisk names actually work. When we say a kilobyte, most people will think of 1000 bytes. This is WRONG, a kilobyte in reality is 1024 bytes, because bits (binary digits or 1/8 of a byte) are in, as the name suggests, binary. If you remember your maths, 1024 is a power of 2 and not 1000. However, harddisk spaces are advertised using 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte and so on. So an advertised 10GB of harddisk, in reality, only has 10000000 bytes, which when divided by 1024 twice, only gives you 9.536743164062 gigabytes of actual storage. This difference will grow even larger when the numbers gets larger. (ie, a 150GB drive only has around 140GB actual storage)

Wow, I can’t believe I actually bothered to do that. -.-