SlashNOT

Mearzuh writes: The upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2, to be released later this year, has been dubbed ‘Windows XP Reloaded’ by Microsoft.

“There’s a bunch of work being done on Windows XP,” said Greg Sullivan, lead Windows product manager, adding that Windows XP Reloaded was a marketing effort as well as a plan to enhance Windows XP software.

Windows XP: Reloaded is filled with a new software concept borrowed from the Java community referred to as ‘agents’. Agents will perform tasks on behalf of the system, such as power management, clearing memory of malfunctioning software, and attempting to destroy humankind. Further user interface improvements abound, such as new colorized buttons (Red for OK, Blue for Cancel). In an effort to compete with Linux in the clustered computing realm, XP also now supports a new feature called Matrix Computing Services which will automatically bind XP workstations together into a supercomputing cluster. Our preliminary tests show that most of the content in XP SP2: Reloaded, while visually stunning, is somewhat less coherent than the original and somewhat exhausting to use. Furthermore, numerous components are obviously not completed; Microsoft has announced that they will be finished in Windows XP SP3: Revolutions.

Mearzuh writes: In yet another of the frivolous lawsuit attempts that seem to be trendy these days, EA Sports decided to sue baseball superstar Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez.

According to the prosecuting lawyers, the basis of this lawsuit lies on the fact that A-Rod is trading teams by the dozens, making it very hard for companies like EA Games, who profit off of sportsmen like A-Rod, to keep up with the constant changes.

A-Rod went from the Seattle Mariners to the Texas Rangers to the New York Yankees within a four year period, and computer art designers who worked on A-Rod’s character in “MVP Baseball 2004″ had worked very hard on making him look good in his Texas uniform - before he traded to the Yankees. Now the game must be postponed because the makers need time to switch A-Rod’s uniform again.

“We cannot have players change their teams at will,” said an attorney of EA Sports, “without having them consult the computer gaming industry to advise them of their change.”

Matthew & Mearzuh writes: Job hunting website Monster.com and Ebay.com have teamed up to create Jobaynster.com, which promises to revolutionize the process of hiring and firing employees. Jobaynster.com COO Helmut Krieg explains:

“Over the last few years, many businesses have found themselves overstocked on employees. Traditionally, when companies laid employees off, they e-mailed them a pinkslip and let them go. That process is incredibly wasteful.”

“We’re turning that excess human capital into a valuable resource by creating a bid based human capital market. Essentially, employers who have excess employees can put them on the block dutch-auction style, moving tens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees in a single transaction.”

“For example, Boeing just offloaded 4,000 employees to Minnesota Mining & Machine and pocketed a hefty 125 per head. That’s a half million dollars that they were previously just letting go.”

“We add value by sorting and classifying the human capital into similar job categories and grouping them by weight. The sick, old, and uninsurable are sent to recycling centers, and the remainder are groomed for sale with an hour of resume and shoe polishing.”

Matthew writes: The Department of Homeland Security has announced a new critical vulnerability in all versions of Pepsi, including Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and the critical Mountain Dew developer support platform.

The flaw is essentially an authentication vulnerability that allows hackers to determine the Pepsi-iTunes song give-away code without properly authenticating with the bottle cap lid through the purchase mechanism.

The vulnerability was originally thought merely to be a code-scanning technique in which vulnerable Pepsi bottle caps with the code could be identified, but it has now been confirmed that the codes can be surreptitiously discovered through a hand-shaking technique and careful scrutiny from outside the plastic bottle perimeter.

Up to 100 million bottles of Pepsi are potentially vulnerable to the hack, according to the bevhacking group 0ski11z, who discovered the exploit.

Pepsi drinkers are advised to avoid popular beverage vendors and sites frequented by teenagers until the bottles can be patched. Bottled sodas dispensed from vending machines are not vulnerable to the exploit.

Mearzuh writes: AOL and Earthlink have joined forces in the battle to sue 531 persons who they believe are illegally swapping email spam.

The companies are accusing the defendents of illegally sharing and downloading spam using free host-to-server POP3 software such as Microsoft Outlook and IncrediMail. “These people were caught downloading as many as 250 million spam messages in the last month alone,” said an AOL spokesperson,” and we cannot allow this in a capitalist society. Because of these people, spam solicitors had lost revenue and had to send out 35 million more messages per week, to make up for the loss. We cannot let things go on like that.”

Next on the list of AOL are bigger spam-swapping websites such as Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail. When asked whether AOL and Earthlink themselves would be on this list, the two companies could not be reached for comment.

Matthew writes: In a gracious speech in Wisconsin this morning, Intel has conceded the 64-bit race to AMD, admitting that there was no way that consumers were actually going to wait for its Itanium line of 64-bit processors to become competitively fast or popular.

“We ran a good race. We ran a hard race. I’m exceptionally proud of the team that we put together. But the results are in, and it’s clear that the momentum is behind AMD and their Opteron.”

“What we’ve got to remember is that this race isn’t about the Itanium vs. the Opteron vs. the G5, it’s about 64-bits vs. 32. That’s why we’re proud to jump on the AMD bandwagon and put our support behind the Opteron 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture. I want everyone who donated their time to watching our campaign, who wished for an Itanium future, to put their support behind Opteron now. We’ve got to unseat the incumbent 32-bit designs if we’re going to move into the future of computing, and it’s more important to move forward with the 64-bit front-runner than it is to split hairs about which architecture would have been superior. Yes, Itanium was a great design and it would have been nice if things could have gone that way, but it just wasn’t compatible with the software of too much of the buying public. Opteron is bringing software compatibility into the future.”

Mearzuh writes: German tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, spotted and photographed the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity in the middle of the Arizona desert.

According to preliminary reports, the husband and wife couple did not report this to anybody right away. “We wanted to have our fun with it, first,” said husband Hansel, “so we kinda took funny pictures with it.” The couple admits that they may have damaged the Spirit rover by toying with it. NASA, however, was able to restore it to full functionality.

As to how the two rovers ended up in Arizona rather than on Mars, even officials are not sure. One official suggests that scientists and technicians involved in the missions may have confused the American with the Metric system, and instead of programming the rover to fly to Mars, it was programmed to slingshot back to Earth.

NASA intends to auction the rovers off on Ebay since they are of no use anymore. But this story is not all that bad, for the couple got to keep its pictures along with their bragging rights. Says a smiling wife Gretle, “I mean come on! How many people can say they have been on Mars and have undoctored pictures to prove it?”

Matthew writes: A San Diego man reports that he has accidentally discovered a “battle mode” that is automatically engaged whenever two Roomba’s are in the same room.

“My wife bought the second Roomba so she could do two rooms at once. At first, it was no problem: The alpha Roomba cleaned the living room, and the beta Roomba cleaned the kitchen.”

“Then one day she left the infra-red virtual wall off, and the beta Roomba ventured right into alpha Roomba territory. What ensued was horrifying. They both immediately entered a spiral scan around one another, in an ever-widening circle until they bumped. The alpha Roomba grabbed the beta Roomba’s spin brush in its beater bar and pulled it off. The beta then immediately did a double reverse, spun around, and slammed into the alpha Roomba’s power button, shutting it off. The beta then sounded the “finished” victory cadence.”

SlashNOT labs investigated the issue and found that iRobot, makers of the Roomba and various battlefield robots for the department of defense, uses the same firmware in all of their robots. Home users are advised never to allow two Roombas into close proximity with one another until iRobot releases a firmware update.

Matthew writes: IT Technicians successfully removed the 2nd CPU from a new Dell Workstation Friday afternoon. The Dell Workstation, purchased January 22nd in Vallejo, California, was delivered with a second CPU and had a motherboard with two processor slots. Dual processor workstations are a rare but not unheard of configuration.

“The Computer had two CPUs, and two processor sockets. But the two CPUs shared memory and all of the peripherals. The concern of course is that the second processor would steal power and memory bandwidth from the primary processor, which of course necessitated its removal.” Said A+ certified IT Technician Rudy Wilson. “We had to jumper some contacts as well to ensure proper operation. It’s a delicate operation.”

Technicians subsequently booted the computer and have verified that it is properly operating.

“I’m so thankful that everything worked out correctly. Now my computer has a chance at normal operation.”

Matthew writes: LeftOut!, the left-handed rights organization recently placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s list of terror organizations and famous for blackmailing and then exposing the manual preference of members of Congress, has claimed responsibility for creating the MyDoom Trojan horse.

“We targeted Microsoft because they have ignored our demands that they create either an ambidextrous or left-handed version of their Bluetooth wireless mouse. We will continue to take such actions against the fascist Right and their crony companies until the Manually Differentiated can live in peace and equality.”

He indicated that the targeting of SCO was purely for test purposes because they figured that nobody would care.