Are you looking for inexpensive but effective dsl or any other internet service. Remember that dial up is still an option worth looking at. Especially when service begins at $9.95.

After leaving college I remember then getting a 1200 baud modem. Wow was that fast. At that point we thought things could not get any better or any faster. Of course I then got a 2400 baud modem. We surely could not get any faster. Of course I then got the 56K modem. I stopped making predictions other than dial up will remain viable.

Dial up today is not the dial up of previous years. I remember when I went to college I use to have to go to the computer center to submit my Fortran programs on punch cards. I am a slow typist so it took me forever to write a 500 line Fortran program.

I also remember the first time I dropped a box of the cards. The problem was I did not have the cards numbers so they were all out of order and I had to restart the entire process.

I was happy when Radio Shack come out with the color computer. I purchased one and then bought a 300 baud modem. Wow, in those days 300 baud seemed extremely fast. I also remember the simple word editor it came with. I used this to write my Basic programs going forward. I no longer had to worry about punch cards. I no longer had to worry about dropping my box of cards and having to rebuild them.

Richard Clarke: China has hacked every major US company

By Emil Protalinski | March 27, 2012, 1:04pm PDT

Summary: Cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke is warning the U.S. that its major companies are being regularly infiltrated by Chinese hackers employed by the Chinese government to steal R&D.

Richard Clarke, a former cybersecurity and cyberterrorism advisor for the White House, was a U.S. government employee for 30 years: between 1973 and 2003. He worked during the times of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. He may not be working under current U.S. president Barack Obama, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have something to warning about. He says state-sanctioned Chinese hackers are stealing R&D from U.S. companies, threatening the long-term competitiveness of America. We’ve heard this before, but the way Clarke puts it makes the situation look even more dire.

“I’m about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong,” Clarke said during an interview with the Smithsonian. “Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China. My greatest fear is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.”

Clarke notes that while the U.S. government is involved in espionage against other governments, it doesn’t hack Chinese companies and then hand over intelligence to their American counterparts. He argues that the same cannot be said for the Chinese government.

Richard Clarke: China has hacked every major US company | ZDNet

Apple, Facebook, Path, Twitter, others face class action lawsuit

By Emil Protalinski | March 21, 2012, 10:51am PDT

Summary: Apple, Beluga, Burbn, Chillingo, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Foodspotting, Foursquare Labs, Gowalla, Hipster, Instagram, Kik, LinkedIn, Path, Rovio Mobile, Twitter, Yelp, and ZeptoLab UK are being sued.

Last week, 13 individuals targeted 18 mobile app makers accused of automatically uploading user address books without permission with a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas. The suit, which seeks class action status, has the following defendants: Apple, Beluga, Burbn, Chillingo, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Foodspotting, Foursquare Labs, Gowalla, Hipster, Instagram, Kik Hipster, LinkedIn, Path, Rovio Mobile, Twitter, Yelp, and ZeptoLab UK.

Here’s an excerpt from the lawsuit:

Literally billions of contacts from the address books of tens of millions of unsuspecting wireless mobile device owners have now been accessed and stolen. The surreptitious data uploads—occurring over both cellular networks and open, public wireless access nodes in homes, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, stores and businesses all across the nation—have, quite literally, turned the address book owners’ wireless mobile devices into mobile radio beacons broadcasting and publicly exposing the unsuspecting device owner’s address book data to the world.

Interestingly, even if Facebook’s own apps aren’t doing anything wrong, the company still has to worry about Beluga and Gowalla, both which it acquired last year:

On information and belief, Facebook has acquired the companies that formerly owned the Gowalla App (i.e., Defendant Gowalla Incorporated) and the Beluga App and/or those companies’

Apple, Facebook, Path, Twitter, others face class action lawsuit | ZDNet

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Customers pre-ordering the new iPad will have to wait up to three weeks to receive the tablet device even though it will be on sale in-store on Friday, according to the company’s website.

The device was announced on Wednesday and is due to go on sale from Apple’s retail stores on Friday 16 March. However, the ordering process on the company’s online store in the UK and US says that pre-ordered iPads will be dispatched in "2-3 weeks".
A spokesman for Apple said that demand for the retina display-equipped device had been "off the charts", forcing it to make the change to the expected delivery dates.
The cheapest Wi-Fi only 16GB model new iPad costs £399, whereas opting for a top of the range, 64GB Wi-Fi + ’4G’ model will set UK customers back £659.
The lightly refreshed device adds a higher resolution display, quad-core graphics processor, and faster data network capabilities in comparison to the iPad 2. However, it is also slightly heavier and slightly thicker than its predecessor.

New iPad pre-order delivery date slips | ZDNet UK

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Meet Apple’s new iPad, now with a Retina Display

By Rachel King | March 7, 2012, 10:47am PST

Summary: Given all of the hype surrounding new Apple products, there are inevitably high expectations for the newest iPad.

Everyone knew it was coming, and here it is: the new iPad.

See also: CNET: Live blogging today’s event
Live Webcast: Let’s talk iPad
New Apple TV announced at iPad event
Apple display spending to double in 2012: report

CEO Tim Cook introduced the newest, 1.4-pound iPad at a special media, invite-only event in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, hailing it as the next step in the “post-PC revolution.”

“In many ways the iPad is reinventing portable computing, and it’s outstripping the wildest of predictions,” Cook told audience-goers, adding that Apple sold 172 million post-PC devices in 2011 alone.

Ever since the unveiling of the iPad 2 last March, rumors have been swirling everywhere as to what the third-generation of the iOS-based tablet would look like. One of the most recent rumors was that the iPad 3 would actually be referred to as the iPad HD.

Yet, it looks like Apple is actually only going to refer to the third-generation as simply “the new iPad” for the time being.

Also as expected, Apple is finally bringing its Retina Display technology (as seen on the iPhone 4 and 4S) to the 9.7 inch screen of the iPad. That includes a 2048 x 1536 resolution with 3.1 million pixels.

Additional hot specs include the A5X quad-core processor, touted as twice as fast and four times better performance than Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip.

Apple developers also stepped up the camera features and abilities considerably from the iPad 2. For starters, the rear camera is now an iSight camera with 5-megapixel, illuminated sensor with a 5-element lens, face detection and IR filter. Another touch of HD on this tablet is the addition of 1080p HD video recording.

Meet Apple’s new iPad, now with a Retina Display | ZDNet

Apple announces iPad event, March 7

By Zack Whittaker | February 28, 2012, 9:36am PST

Summary: Apple has said it will hold an event on March 7th — a little over a week from now — to announce the next-generation iPad tablet.

Finally. We now know something about the next-generation iPad for sure. It will be announced in just over a week’s time on March 7th.

The company remained tight-lipped over the announcement, indicating very little besides the date of the event.

As per previous invitations, little is given away by the invitation itself. What is seen, however, appears to be a high-resolution display.

CNBC this morning tweeted that the upcoming device would be quad-core and boast a high-speed 4G LTE chip. However, the logistics of doing so would require a far greater battery than is currently in the iPad 2. It also contradicts well-connected AllThingsD, a stable source of Apple news, and many others too.

It also claimed the event would be held in New York, rather than San Francisco. An Apple spokesperson confirmed that the event will be held in San Francisco.

Related:

• Could Apple ‘do an iPhone 4S’ with the next-generation iPad?
• Motorola wins iCloud injunction; iPhone, iPad temporarily pulled from online store
• Apple’s iPad 3 refresh likely to kick off sales boom
• What will Apple’s iPad 3 ‘retina display’ mean for you?
• Want an iPad 3? Sell your current iPad now for maximum value!

Apple announces iPad event, March 7 | ZDNet

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today

From 1970s minicomputers used for military programs (including nuclear weapons) to an IBM punch-card system still keeping the books at a Texas filter supplier, these are the computers that time forgot.

By Benj Edwards, PCWorld    Feb 19, 2012 8:00 pm

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology–to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?

Wrong!

While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.

If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway or taken money from certain older ATMs, for instance, your transaction was made possible by IBM’s OS/2, an operating system that debuted 25 years ago and faded out soon after.

A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s. That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time. Here’s hoping that uptime statistics are better for the ancient minicomputers used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, Navy submarines, fighter jets, and other weapons programs. Those systems, according to the consultants who help keep them going, will likely be used until at least the middle of this century.

Here are a few stories of the computers that time forgot, and the people and institutions that stubbornly hold on to them.

Punch-Card Accounting

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler Filters’ IBM 402, with self-employed field engineer Duwayne Leafley in the foreground. Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.

Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today | PCWorld

Microsoft warns of dangerous IE browser vulnerabilities

By Ryan Naraine | February 14, 2012, 11:19am PST

Summary: The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user simply views a specially crafted web page using Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is warning all users of its Internet Explorer web browser to immediately apply the latest security patch as a precaution against malicious hacker attacks.

As part of its Patch Tuesday releases, the company shipped a high-priority IE update (MS12-010) which covers four documented vulnerabilities that could be used in drive-by downloads with minimal user action.

The update is rated “critical” for Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 on Windows client machines and Microsoft expects to see reliable exploit code published with the next 30 days.

The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted web page using Internet Explorer, Microsoft warned.

[ SEE: Hackers pounce on just-patched Windows Media vulnerability ]

The IE patch addresses the vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles content during copy and paste processes, handles objects in memory, and creates and initializes strings.

The company is also urging Windows users to pay special attention to MS12-013, a critical bulletin that fixes a flaw that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted media file that is hosted on a website or sent as an email attachment.

From the bulletin:

A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the way that the msvcrt DLL calculates the size of a buffer in memory, allowing data to be copied into memory that has not been properly allocated. This vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted media file. If a user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system.

Microsoft also noted that any application that uses msvcrt.dll could be affected by

Microsoft warns of dangerous IE browser vulnerabilities | ZDNet