Monday Morning Tech News

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So what convinced you to go after Macromedia?
Chizen: Every year we go through our previous strategy plan...When we sat down this year, we talked about how to give users more of a rich experience, more animation, more graphics, more video and more collaboration around Acrobat. Then we took a look at Macromedia and said, "Jeez, if we had Macromedia as part of our asset base, we could speed up our execution against our strategy." Without that, we might have been late. That was driving me more than scale.

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Secure Startup uses a chip called the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, which offers protected storage of encryption keys, passwords and digital certificates. Vista uses this capability to verify that a PC has not been tampered with when it starts up and to protect data through encryption. The TPM is typically affixed to the motherboard of a PC. Because it is stored in hardware, the information is more secure from external software attacks and physical theft. To service a PC, the Secure Startup feature can be temporarily disabled. And if a PC breaks and data on a hard drive needs to be accessed on, say, a different machine, a recovery key can unlock the system, Heil said. This recovery key is generated when a user enables Secure Startup and should be stored away from the computer.

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Cohen however, was coy on Taylor's proposal. "As far as working with Microsoft on a study, Microsoft could probably find one negative line on Linux in a 100-page research report that it would spend $10 million marketing while ignoring the other 99 pages," he said in his e-mail to ZDNet Asia.

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After handing over the goods, Bitar explained his unusual entry into the high-tech weapons market as he headed into Arlington for dinner. The lightning gun began, literally, as a daydream when Bitar was running a Styrofoam recycling business in the early 1990s. Watching the machinery that cut up the used material, he noticed sparks shooting into the air. He began to wonder, at first idly and then more intensely, if there was a way to extend the sparks' range.

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n Biloxi, CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano reported that wind gusts topping 100 mph were starting to pull the roofs off of nearby buildings. Hurricane warnings are posted from Morgan City, Louisiana, eastward to the Alabama-Florida state line, including New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. This means winds of at least 74 mph are expected in the warning area within the next 24 hours.