Cody Taylor

suraj.sun writes “Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a ‘flawed’ business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a “malfunctioning” business model. Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.”

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PLSQL Guy writes “Tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users. The PCs tested were slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, considered to be a threshold for when an actual performance change is noticeable to the average user. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 can’t significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?”

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1sockchuck writes “It take most companies at least a year to build a new data center. Digital Realty Trust says it can build a new data center in just 20 weeks using standard designs and modular components that can be assembled on site. The company equates its “building blocks” approach to data centers to building with Legos — albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?”

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An anonymous reader writes “Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defense system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay. The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) ground to air missile defense system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin — who designed and built the system. First part of story. Scary that they did not wipe it to Department of Defense standards which I believe is wiping the whole disk and then writing 1010 all over it.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When a system update caused service failures and bugs in T-Mobile customers’ unlocked iPhones, the users emailed T-Mobile to alert them to the issue. Even though T-Mobile doesn’t offer the iPhone, they fixed the bugs and gave the users a service credit for the inconvenience.

It needs state permission first, but that’s what a California utility has proposed doing in response to a report citing the overloading of old wooden poles as the cause of a fire that ravaged Malibu. Power would be turned off if winds exceed 35 mph. And they’re calling this brainstorm “pro-active de-energization,” lest anyone get the right idea.

Tomas Norström, the judge who presided over the Pirate Bay trial, has been accused of bias once again. After the trial against TPB he was accused of bias as he is well connected with quite a few different pro-copyright and intellectual property organizations. A retrial is one alternative for TPB, and this will be decided by a higher court later.