Items tagged with boot
When the hackers roll to Vegas, you know a good amount of exploits are going to surface. Defcon was on point this week in the Nevada desert, and here's yet another exploit that has piqued our interest. Researchers have discovered that the Windows 8 Secure Boot mechanism can be circumvented on PCs built by certain manufacturers. Why? Oversights in how those particular vendors implemented the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification. Andrew Furtak, Oleksandr Bazhaniuk and Yuriy Bulygin were on hand to showcase their findings. Thankfully, due to the nature of the event, none of the specifics are shown; instead, companies are alerted so that fixes can be put in place before ill-willed...
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In anticipation of Intel-based Mac owners updating their Boot Camp partitions to Microsoft’s Windows XP SP3, which will officially be released on April 29, Apple yesterday made available for download update 2.1 of its Boot Camp utility. Apple claims that the 2.1 update must be installed before installing SP3: “This update addresses issues and improves compatibility with Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Vista running on a Mac computer using Boot Camp. It is highly recommended for all Boot Camp users. Important: Installation of Boot Camp 2.1 is required before installing Windows XP ServicePack 3 (SP3).” Versions of the Boot Camp 2.1 update for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista were also available...
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Initially Microsoft showed little interest in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project until the orders started to pour in. The thought of all those laptops going to developing countries (and even Alabama school districts) sans a Windows OS seems to have made an impact.As soon as MS saw how many sales they were passing up, they decided that they'd develop a variant of XP specifically for the OLPC and its limited storage capacity. Then we heard that there might be a dual-boot setup in the works, and now this:“Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop."Perhaps we'll just have to wait a while to find out, but it does seem a bit odd that...
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While it's no secret that Microsoft has been working on getting Windows XP to run on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation's XO-1, they also said in December that it wasn't exactly an easy process. Despite this, Wednesday, the chairman of the OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, indicated they are working on a dual-boot version of the XO-1."We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful. We're working very hard to do both," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.It's a brand-new development for the XO laptops, as the low-cost notebooks...
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What's new is old again, it seems. Security researchers are warning consumers to be cautious about using items like freebie flash drives that are given out as souvenirs at trade shows and similar events. There are recent reports of malware being loaded onto removable storage devices like USB flash drives, and even digital picture frames.In mid-December, Kaspersky Lab senior virus analyst Aleks Gostev penned a blog post describing his experience with an infectious Compact Flash card for his digital camera. "We've already written more than once about viruses and worms which spread via removable storage media by launching automatically from autorun.inf," he said. "A number of users have also...
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Never mind waiting for the face of Jesus to appear on your toast and make you an e*bay thousandaire. Now a company in Italy will let you have the face of a saint appear on your cellphone screen, in the form of a digital "holy card" or santino.A company in Italy started offering the service on Tuesday but ran into opposition from some Catholic Church leaders who think the idea is crass and commercial."We found a need and filled it," Barbara Labate, who came up with the idea with her business partner in a cellphone services company based in Milan, told Reuters by telephone.Many taxis, private cars and trucks in Italy have a small picture of a saint -- known as a "santino" or little saint...
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Another South American country has ditched Windows for Linux, not exactly a new phenomenon, but Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has done just that and more. Chavez personally announced last week that the "Bolivarian Computer," a Venezuelan made PC and notebook line, will be available to the public soon in four different models and that all of them would come with Linux. Inspur Group, the parent company of Venezuela de Industria Tecnologica collaberated with the Venezuelan government to produce the new line up and hopes to produce as many as 150,000 annually. The new PCs and notebooks will cost between $405 and $1,400 USD. The "Bolivarian Computer," a locally...
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Apple has updated Boot Camp Beta to support 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. Keep in mind that this is a beta version and not a polished retail product so be wary of using it for anything that is absolutely critical to you or your business. If you're running Apple hardware and want to add a Vista boot option, check it out here. Boot Camp 1.2 beta includes: Support for Windows Vista (32-bit) Updated drivers, including but not limited to trackpad, AppleTime (synch), audio, graphics, modem, iSight camera Support the Apple Remote (works with iTunes and Windows Media Player) A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions Improved keyboard support for Korean, Chinese,...
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VIA EPIA EN-Powered Ainkaboot Octimod Cluster Makes HPC Scalable and Affordable Energy efficient, ultra compact modular design provides high density parallel and supercomputing units that can grow with your organization Taipei, Taiwan, 19th February 2007 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that Ainkaboot, a London-based company designing cluster servers for high performance computing (HPC) and high availability computing, is shipping the first ultra compact Octimod MPC7-1500 cluster modules powered by VIA EPIA EN15000 mainboards. Based on the Beowulf concept of providing HPC using off-the-shelf hardware,...
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You know a technology is on its last breath when large retail chains stop supporting it. It was the case when major retailers stopped selling VHS tapes, and now it seems the floppy disk is going the same way. PC World as announced it will no longer support the format once it stock runs out, and you can expect many other retail chains to eventually follow suit. It was a good storage device, but its time has come. "In 1998, an estimated 2 billion floppy disks were sold, according to the Recording Media Industries Association of Japan. Since then global demand has fallen by around two-thirds to an estimated 700 million by 2006."...
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In our recent fall IDF coverage we told you about Intel's upcoming Santa Rosa platform for Notebooks that employs something known by its code name as the "Robson" module, that incorporates NAND Flash in a solid state disk-cache design. Here's a little demo of Fuji Siemens notebooks loaded with Windows XP and what NAND flash disk caching can do for boot times... If you were expecting more of a performance boost, remember the OS itself has a lot of influence on boot times as well. Vista's new Windows ReadyDrive technology should really take things to another level and not just with respect to boot times but disk access in general....
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E3 is always filled with the latest and greatest in gaming. With Xbox 360 selling well and DX10 and Vista on the horizon, even Microsoft had large presence at E3. For a tour of their booth complete with a handful of pics, check out this article at ThinkGaming... "At the farthest back point in the South Hall you'll find Microsoft's enormous booth that spans almost a half of a football field and featuring hundreds of playable Xbox 360s. For a company as big as they are, they don't skimp when it comes to making an unforgettable presence on the showfloor, and they have certainly done so. The entire back half of the booth is a two-story set of rooms for press and presentations that is...
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Claiming a "triple boot," the open-source project that first claimed the ability to boot OS X and Windows in the same machine has now added Linux to the mix. The open-source project that first came up with a way to dual-boot an Intel-based Mac into either Mac OS X or Windows XP has published instructions on how to add Linux to the mix. "Triple Boot," as the OnMac.net Web site calls it, relies on the newly-released Boot Camp, Apple Computer Inc.'s dual-boot utility that created a major stir when it debuted two weeks ago. The process is involved and not for the technically faint-of-heart, as it "chainloads" Linux from an already-installed...
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Some Mac users are reporting problems with Apple's Boot Camp, the software that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows. Ironically, some users have said been stuck with Windows, with their hardware left unable to reboot the Mac OS. In a discussion thread on Apple's technical support Web site, more than a dozen users reported that Boot Camp successfully partitioned their hard drive and allowed them to install a working version of Windows, but then would no longer allow them to switch back. "It all worked fine until I wanted to start up OS X. Then the startup screen never progressed. I actually left and came back an hour later and it was still...
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