Dell
Dell to enter home entertainment and home electronic segment.
dell is opening a music download portal.

CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly
The lead author of the controversial report about Microsoft
security risks, "CyberInsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly," found himself
sans job yesterday when his employer, @stake, discovered he promoted
his company credentials when he wrote and publicized the report.
According to @stake, Daniel Greer, the company's former chief
technology officer (CTO), "is no longer associated" with the company;
@stake also noted that "the values and opinions of the report are not
in line with [@stake's] views." Conspiracy theorists will ignore the
fact that both Microsoft and @stake said the software giant had
nothing to do with Greer's firing, but bigger concerns are at stake
than just one man's job. Because Microsoft's largest competitors
sponsored the report, how valuable or accurate the report can
therefore be is unclear. Sponsoring a report that touts the
competitive advantages of your own product is one thing, but pushing
competitors' opinions on governments that are in a position to
dramatically alter the competitive landscape is another thing
entirely. In the meantime, the accusations are going to fly.

"The more opinions you have, the less you see."
-Wim Wenders

ATM + Windows
According to a study that Celent Communications published last
week, most ATMs in the United States will be running a Windows OS by
2005, a scary proposition for anyone who's seen the Blue Screen of
Death or other crashes while doing such innocuous things as copying a
file or printing. But, hey, I'm sure Windows is up to the task of
accurately dispensing money and properly debiting my checking account.
Apparently, the banking industry is finally getting ready to dump the
aging and rarely updated IBM OS/2, which is the most common ATM OS
these days, and move to Windows, which is more compatible with the
networks that banks now use

Cold reading
http://skepdic.com/coldread.html
http://www.andypryke.com/pub/ColdReading

Linux Security
Linux still suffers from far more security bugs and other vulnerabilities than Windows does. Researchers at mi2g Intelligence Unit, which has been tracking and verifying computer-based vulnerabilities since 1995, say that in August 67 percent of all successful and verifiable attacks against servers targeted Linux, compared with just 23.2 percent that targeted Windows--and August was the month during which SoBig.F and MSBlaster hit. Furthermore, 12,892 e-business sites running Linux were
successfully breached during that month, compared with just 4626 sites running Windows. Windows vulnerabilities get more press because more people run Windows on the desktop, so any Windows-based worms or viruses will generally affect a far larger group of individuals. But anyone who thinks that jumping to Linux is a cure-all should think again.

SUN
Bill Joy leaves Sun today

Microsoft Promotes WMV as Industry Standard
Microsoft announced yesterday that it will offer its Windows Media
Video (WMV) 9 video-compression technologies as an industry standard
to provide third parties with its superior video format at a lower
cost. The company says that yesterday it presented WMV 9, which
launched in January, to the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers (SMPTE), an international standards body, for review. If
adopted as a standard, WMV 9 would be more accessible to third parties
because its specifications would be open.

Linux
The governments of China, Japan, and South Korea are banding
together to create an open-source OS (likely to be based on Linux)

The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsoft.html

Microsoft Signs OS Deal with Motorola
Microsoft has reportedly signed an important deal with Motorola to
supply the cell-phone maker with a version of Windows Mobile OS for
smart cell phones. Motorola, the world's second-largest cell-phone
maker, only recently--and not coincidentally--sold its stake in
Symbian, Microsoft's largest competitor in the smart cell-phone
market. Motorola had previously said it would look to Linux for its
future designs

TSQL
sp_passsword -> Changes password for a specific login name.
e.g. EXEC sp_password ‘oldpass’, ‘newpass’, ‘username’
sp_tables -> Shows all the tables in the current database.
e.g. EXEC sp_tables
xp_cmdshell -> Runs arbitary command on the machine with administrator privileges. (most imp)
xp_msver -> Shows the MS SQL server version including the all info about the OS.
e.g. master..xp_msver
xp_regdeletekey -> Deletes a registry key.
xp_regdeletevalue ->Delets a registry value
xp_regread -> Reads a registry value
xp_regwrite -> Writes a registry key.
xp_terminate_process -> Stops a process

Good site
Great hack-resource site http://neworder.box.sk/
Good sql server security site http://sqlsecurity.com/

Quake II
Quake II source code is now available for Managed C++ using Visual Studio .NET 2003, with speeds comparable to the orginal one which was mostly written in C. The .NET version even adds new features like a "Quake radar" .. transparancy etc.
check out http://www.vertigosoftware.com/quake2.htm

.NET
Windows Automotive, the hot s/w for automobilies
now enlist clients like BMW and Toyota