“About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms,” Svensson reports.

“Intel Corp. appeared to be among the victims, according to employee posts on Twitte,” Svensson reports. “Intel did not immediately return calls for comment.”

Full article here.

Declan McCullagh reports for CNET, “The University of Michigan’s medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports, and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails cancelled visitation.”

“Early reports attributed the widespread problems to a routine McAfee update that caused computers with Microsoft’s Service Pack 3 installed to incorrectly identify a legitimate operating system component as containing a virus,” McCullagh reports. “A report at the Internet Storm Center said the McAfee update registered a false positive and flagged the Windows file svchost.exe as a virus.”

“McAfee has posted a Web page on a separate site with detailed instructions on how to fix XP computers that have been crashing because of Wednesday’s update. It recommends manually downloading and installing an ‘EXTRA.DAT’ file, and then restore files that have been incorrectly quarantined,” McCullagh reports. “But that option requires a least a modest amount of technical ability, and as of 1 p.m. PDT, the company had not offered a better way.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“The company made the announcement Tuesday at its MIX conference for Web developers, saying a platform preview for Internet Explorer 9 is ready for developers to kick the tires,” Chan reports. “‘We’re all in’ for HTML5, said Windows division President Steve Sinofsky.”

“‘We are really happy to see Microsoft catching up on standards and implementing things developers really like to use,’ said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism at Mozilla, which has been building HTML5 standards into Firefox over several versions. ‘We’ve been frustrated that it’s taken a long time’ for Microsoft, but we’re happy to see they’re doing it.’ Blizzard said Microsoft’s platform preview does not include some key HTML5 features, such as support for playing video and audio without a plug-in and a drawing feature called Canvas,” Chan reports.

One of the challenges Microsoft faces is that HTML5 would compete with Silverlight, Microsoft’s Web software for video and animation online,” Chan reports. “‘When it gets approved, it can replace [Adobe] Flash or Silverlight,’ said Matt Rosoff, analyst at Kirkland-based independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. ‘Silverlight reverses HTML5.’ For now, Microsoft is pushing both at developers at the conference in Las Vegas.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Microsoft, used to a near monopoly in the PC market even though it doesn’t make any hardware, has found the same rules do not apply in phones. Its Windows software has not been able to deliver the same consistency of performance across a range of different phones,” Rigby reports. “‘It’s something I know they’ve talked about — buying Research in Motion or even Nokia,’ Toan Tran, an analyst at Morningstar, said of Microsoft. ‘To really compete in this business, Microsoft needs to get into the hardware business, where they are able to control the entire user experience. Apple has shown that’s the model that works. In a consumer device, people just want something that works, they don’t want something as complicated as a PC.’”

Rigby continues, “Wall Street has long speculated that Microsoft might make a play for RIM, Nokia or Palm Inc. But such talk is almost always accompanied by skepticism over whether Microsoft would want to get into the hardware business and compete with phones that already use its Windows software.”

“The company’s attempted $47.5 billion takeover of Yahoo in 2008 shows that it is not afraid of large deals, but Chief Executive Steve Ballmer this week poured cold water on the suggestion of a big acquisition in the mobile sector,” Rigby reports. “The word ‘ever’ is a big word, but I certainly don’t feel like that’s the right strategy for us today,’” Ballmer told Reuters at the launch of the new phone software in Barcelona.”

Rigby continues, “The latest smartphone market figures show Microsoft’s share fell to 8.8 percent last year from 13.9 percent the year before, according to tech research firm Canalys. In the same time, Apple’s share jumped to 15.1 percent from 9.6 percent.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

Burrows reports, “‘This rivalry is going to accelerate innovation,’ says Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in Google. ‘Apple goes pretty fast, but having someone chasing you always makes you go faster. This is going to be good for consumers.’”

“Still, in a battle over the future of computing, friendship will almost surely be a casualty of progress,” Burrows reports. “‘You can just feel the tension rising,’ says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. ‘Until the Nexus One, the competition was at arm’s length. But the iPhone is Apple’s darling. Now it’s personal.’”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

But if you’re too sweet to trouble her, you can do the PDF conversion yourself. Fire up your Web browser and head to pdfonline.com/convert-pdf. Follow the instructions to browse your Mac for the PUB file (up to 2MB in size), choose a name for your converted PDF file, and supply your email address. Then click the Convert To PDF button, and the site will make your new PDF file and email it to you when it’s ready, for free. Ours came quickly, about 1 minute later.

PDFOnline.com can convert several file types to PDF, including PUB, PPT, PPS, and more.

“Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away,” Bishop reports. “The scene was visible on the big screen, so even people in the upper deck could see what was happening.”

Bishop reports, “Of course, Ballmer might do better in the future by making sure that the employee has good reason to pick a Windows-branded phone over competing devices — but as one of the person’s colleagues noted on Twitter, ‘you just don’t pick up the CEO of Chevy in a BMW.’”

Full article here.

“In my brief comments yesterday on the new touchscreen Zune HD that is set to debut September 15, I noted: Clearly, the Zune HD is going to be compared to the iPod Touch. Its biggest shortcoming is that it’s just a media player and web browser; no apps, no games,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball.