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Given they're already partnering with the MPAA for "Respect Copyrights" patches, surely they should be their first port of call rather than those evil open source pirates?

When literature for your merit badges contains text like, "There are peer to peer groups who offer legal downloads and those who offer illegal downloads. Make a list of both. Suggest ways to detect peer to peer software like the MPAA Parent File Scan." it would be kind of hypocritical to then advocate software that's liable to be built off the kinds of tools, by the kinds of evil people, another badge already warns about.

A huge part of the BSA is a great and honorable institution. But when it comes to institutionalizing homophobia, forcing religious beliefs and teaming up with corporate entities that demonize whole communities, it's probably not the best time to go asking for those communities for help.

Until they remove the "MPAA approved" copyright merit badge, dont help them in any way.

Or... Does anybody remember THIS? I do.

Unlocking the phone is not illegal.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-8280.html

Sorry, got my Ars links confused, I meant to post this one: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/09/att-teases-with-some-3g-iphone-data-plan-pricing-details

this is a good start, I imagine http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/09/att-remains-sole-iphone-carrier-in-us-revenue-sharing-axed

My iPhone has fallen down a flight of stairs, and you can't tell. No scratches, no nothing. It is very durable.

Linky: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review.ars/13

Ubuntu netbook remix or whatever it is called is going to address this by providing a new interface designed for small screens. Ars has a bunch of screenshots and more information. The solution isn't perfect but is in a step in the right direction.

This (good interface real estate usage) is one area that I have to give credit to Apple for doing very well. Apple interfaces are very clean and for the most part a good use of screen real estate (minimal window border, fewer menus and toolbars). Gnome tends to be a little on the fat side with buttons, menus, and toolbars but hopefully that will start changing with this new market. I do wish that application developers would stop using the default "file" menus as a crutch to stuff things into or stuffing toolbars with buttons all over the place (gimp, open office, old versions of ms office, many IDEs). On small screens that becomes especially annoying since there is no more room to grow the windows.

• "We have received further confirmation from AT&T on these details. AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told us that the May 27 deal applies to iPhones bought from both Apple Stores and AT&T, and that the new 2-year contract replaces your previous contract. So, if you recently signed a 2-year contract (as I did, in January), you don't have to commit to two more years for a total of four. You only have to sign a brand new 2-year contract. In my case, that would make my total contract time 2 years and 6 months or so."

• "The first thing you have to do once you take the iPhone out of its box is turn it on and activate it. No part of the iPhone's functionality--including that of the iPod--is accessible until the phone is activated through an AT&T plan (without hacking)."

Verizon is building out its network to support the iPhone. My understanding is that EV-DO is a 3G flavor of GSM so it should be compatible with the iPhone. Verizon is also opening up its network so you can use non-Verizon devices, such as the iPhone. Be patient, grasshopper.

One group having a few more or less than perfect statistical average is really no surprise. Anywhoo, it'd be interesting to ask Slashdot and news.google for their user stats and see if geeks really do use linux more than the general population.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050327-4738.html

1. ACTA is being negotiated in secret. A very bad practice. On the other hand, it is also being negotiated by an incompetent, generally scorned, lame duck administration with no "fast track" authority, so an opposition Congress will get to pick apart whatever they are sent and will be more inclined to do so for purely political reasons. The chances of ACTA actually being done any time soon are slim and none.
2. What was leaked is not a draft of the actual ACTA agreement or anything like it. It is four pages of vague suggestions of what someone (no one knows who) thinks should be in it.
3. Doctorow's description of what is in the leaked document makes it clear that he didn't bother actually reading it, but rather he seems to be channelling other people's conjecture about what might end up in ACTA when and if it actually becomes real.

A deeper, less hysterical, and non-intellectually dishonest analysis than Doctorow's chicken-littling is at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080602-the-real-acta-threat-its-not-ipod-scanning-border-guards.html

MS have said that Windows Server 2008 will be the last 32 bit OS they put out, so Windows 7 will presumably be 64 bit only: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070517-windows-vista-declared-32-bits-last-hurrah.html

Of course, you will still want to run 32 bit apps but I guess some kind of emulation, like Mac OS, would be fine. The incentive would be cost and silicone savings on new 64 bit only CPUs. Then we can retire x86.

Not for their next version.

The "normal usage" for Firefox is using less memory than other browsers. This has been repeatably verified, not just by Mozilla developers:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html
http://www.thebrowserworld.com/2008/03/29/firefox-30-beta-4-vs-opera-950-beta-vs-safari-31-beta-multiple-sites-opening-test/
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/03/26/cybernotes-browser-performance-comparisons/
Now, again, if you see any memory problem, you'll have to be specific about what it is. The rest of us don't see it. It's not "denial," it's just the truth.

Yes
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.html
http://www.thebrowserworld.com/2008/03/29/firefox-30-beta-4-vs-opera-950-beta-vs-safari-31-beta-multiple-sites-opening-test/
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/03/26/cybernotes-browser-performance-comparisons/

Ars had a good article about it

Stupid lameness filter.

You can take a look at the power dissipation of both of the chips at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080529-via-takes-the-wraps-off-isaiah-meet-the-nano.html

While the Atom certainly delivers impressive power statistics compared to our typical laptop processors, they are still far from the level of the ARM family. A recent article on Ars Technica will explain why. ARM processors are by far the most common processor on the low power frontier and the reason seems apparent; even at 1GHz they claim to reach operational power consumption around 300mW. Now, granted, it is on a RISC instruction set, but their upcoming Cortex-A9 will support multicore and starts to sound like a very interesting alternative for a notebook processor.

Could someone drop me a message as soon as those things start entering the market?

Except in the EU, a "Health Inspector" is liable to come-a-visiting and take a peek into that closet and look under your rug:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080221-eu-to-ms-well-believe-it-when-we-see-it.html

Yes, looks like a new round in the CISC (now represented by Intel Atom) vs. RISC (now represented by Tegra) flame war. Ars Teechnica had an interesting article about the new relevance of the differences of the two architectures two weeks ago.

Wasn't china working on their own High Def format?

Toshiba's name is not absent this list, so I'm guessing this is the same format.

That's really fascinating.

$50 is what Dell claim Windows costs.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-windows-tax-is-50-according-to-dell-linux-pc-pricing.html

So does that mean that Windows is paid for by the crapware vendors? Cool.

Did you fail reading comprehension?

No.

Are you capable of reading and understanding atleast the title of the page that I linked to?

Yes.

It's really hard to discuss things with someone that's either mentally impaired or intentionally acting dumb.

I agree that conversing with you is difficult. Acknowledging your problem is the first step to fixing it. :)

Shit joke, but how did you expect me to react (rhetorical question).

About the Netcraft vs. SecuritySpace stats: Netcraft base their server survey on what server software runs a domain, subdomain or any other thing arbitrarily defined as a 'site': This includes live.com profiles, myspace.com profiles and blogger.com sites. I have searched for the document on netcraft.com that confirms this, but it has disappeared. This is reasonably common knowledge though: see this Slashdot post and this Web Server Survey from last year.

SecuritySpace, on the other hand, counts physical servers. There are problems with this approach, but physical servers were what we were discussing.

Additionally, I wouldn't describe Netcraft's figures as accurate. They have been gamed by Microsoft: Firstly by the deal with GoDaddy, which caused the first jump in favour of IIS and GoDaddy's subsequent purchase of RegisterFly, which caused the second.

Also note the absence of Facebook profiles as sites, it's a closed community so cannot be counted, skewing the results in favour of Microsoft again.

Bell sells a capped service. They say you can get 60G/month. So it should be easy to figure out the average load on the network with everyone under this Cap. If Bell can't actually provide the service they sell, then they should set the cap at a level they can support.

Think for a second how oversubscribed Bells network is. Here you can use Bells own claims. "5 percent of users generate 60 percent of its total traffic":
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080519-regulators-want-answers-from-bell-canada-on-p2p-throttling.html

So how much are those nasty 5% capable of gobbling down?

If you max your cap that is 2G/day. Say all of it is in the peak 12 hour window (but actually heavy downloaders run 24/7).

So 1G/6hours. 167MB/hour = 45 kB/s. This is the most on average, that the theoretical bandwidth hogs can use. Bell advertises a service that is 10 times that speed. So if everyone was a peak user and only used it during the peak window, bells network is over-subscribed by 10 to 1 vs the evil bandwidth hogs.

BUT these are the evil 5% choking down 60% of the bandwidth according to Bell. How much does the other 40% (good users) average? So (60%) = 5% x 45 kB/s = 224kB/s, so (40%) = 150kB/s /95% = 1.58 kB/s

So a "good" user averages 1.58kB/s, less than modem speed. If sold a 5mb/s connection (Bell advertises up to 7mb/s), they are oversubscribed about 300 to 1 on what they expect from users.

So is a 300 to 1 over-subscription fair? Perhaps bell should be forced to tell it's customers their target average usage for their network. In Bells case that seems to be 1.5kB/s average if used a lot by everyone. Is this adequate for a service sold as up to 7mb/s fast and never shared??
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpInt_Perf.page
"Consistently fast service that's never shared"

High speed always on, never shared internet connections are not the telephone service, with 5 minute hold times and 2 hours a week usage. This is multi-hour/day usage. Attempting to solve bandwidth problems by traffic shaping traffic you don't like is a never ending cat and mouse game that doesn't address the real issue: Over subscription of the network or a completely incorrect usage model. This has to be addressed regardless of any traffic shaping. What is next shaping youtube? Voip? VOD? How can this be justified when you start offering VOIP and VOD services.

both hardware mfr. and Linux developers
Yes, but their hardware quality, especially in comparaison to Gigabyte (by itself it's fine), has been in a rather harsh decline since the launch of S775/AM2.

Oh, they don't develop anything Linux/GPL IIRC. The linux distro on the eeePC is outsourced to Xandros, a shoddy company that puts my city's already crappy tech sector to shame. They were also one of the companies that signed a deal with MS, another reason to avoid them (Novell's turned out to be not too bad, the ones following it however were a lot worse).

Still, I love the eeePC, because it was the first and the only subnotebook to be under 400$ and released to the "general market", something MSI, Dell, and HP have missed.

Apple using them as their vendor
Apple uses Foxconn parts.

Linux has needed a single, unified, vision from the beginning
I would like to direct you to kernel.org :)

That said, really, there is no need for a unified Linux distro. Almost everything is "unified". The only thing that really differs amongst distro packagers are slight kernel modifications, small lib changes (basically things that would make an Ubuntu binary not run on Debian), and choice of package managers; even then, only two are relevant; .deb and .rpm.

get past all o fthe choice/freedom crap
Why are you using Linux again? Might as well go back to MS/Apple if you have an attitude like that. That's not to say we're all elitists, I even less, but if you don't like the "choice/freedom crap" then you're free to leave you know.

and get on to a unified UI,
Why? I freaking hate EDE. I hate gnustep. I hate FLTK. I love GTK. Why should we have a unified UI? All of the major desktops (Xfce, Gnome, KDE) have unified on a set of desktop standards, namely Tango, so there's nothing really non-"unified". Sure, there's different toolkits, but hey buddy:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.media/vista.png (and they've left out non-MS toolkits too!)
http://bla.st/static/blog/macos_interfaces.gif

Yeah, good job Apple and MS! We should really be "unified" too! That's what people want! As opposed to two major ones, GTK, QT, and one minor one, FLTK!

"Linux" looks rather unified to me. Look at how well GTK and QT can play together.

a solid look and feel,
Feels solid to me. If you have complaints make 'em verbose & direct so we can fix it.

and most importantly ONE of everything that is best in class and 100% working by default.
Yeah, like things on the OSX and Windows side work 100% amirite or amirite? You don't have to install every effing program you know. You're free to use the apps you like, and I'm sure it's in your distro provider's best intentions to give you the nicest experience they can. Otherwise you've got a bad maintainer and should leave.

Since the OSS community will never agree to do this, a company is my only hope (as sad as that is). I'm wishing ASUS nothing but luck.
Yeah, like Asus does such a good job; have you ever looked at their xandros desktop? Not exactly farts and sunshine there. I especially like that they mixed IceWM and KDE. That's two toolkits that need to be loaded. Good game, guys.

The 38-page PDF

(via Ars Technica - "Google tries anonymously fighting eBay's PayPal-only policy")

Hmmmm, you're right. Check out this graph (bottom of page). If you look at the previous page, you can see that commodore dominated for a while in the early 80s, along with Atari and Apple, but PC was a rising force. Then Commodore stumbled in the business sector, Atari faltered, who knows why Apple managed to make it. Could it be that their product actually was good enough to last them through? Certainly the Apple fans were no less devoted than Amiga fans.

Will it be really open?
Open enough so that I can modify its software circumvent those pesky broadcasting flags and record whatever I want, even American Gladiators?
If so, we're on to something.

I'm still waiting for a fix for the stupid Dock folder problem. Yes, I know there's a workaround (you can put a file or an alias or a folder or something inside the folder, name it something that will be first in an alphabetical sort, and paste a reasonable icon onto that). But I want Apple to recognize how completely retarded this idea was from the beginning, and actually FIX it, the way they fixed the menubar transparency issue first by reducing the transparency before release, then eventually adding an option to disable it altogether.

Seriously, who thought either of these would be a good idea? I know what they were thinking with the menubar, they were thinking "Windows Vista has lots of transparency, we don't want to look boring by comparison!" Come on Apple, I know you can make usability a priority without sacrificing aesthetics when you put your collective mind to it. Focusing entirely on aesthetics at the expense of usability really damages your image.

The low attach rate is a myth.

Ars Technica reports that mail from GMail is now being blocked by some anti-spam vendors. Now that there are tools for automatically creating GMail accounts in bulk, GMail has become very popular with spammers. GMail is widely used as the reply address in spam emails, especially ones associated with bulk-created Blogger accounts. Check the reply address in most "replica watch" spams, for example.

Google has thus become a major supporting player in the spammer ecosystem. As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.

I don't know about the Pidgin guys. I think empathy is going to be stealing the place of pidgin in many linux users desktops if they aren't careful. It already has a form of video/voice chat built in and has been proposed for inclusion in Gnome.

On iliad you can annotate, but the method ain't perfect. See the end of this article for a review.

Regarding the price.. Iliad has a bigger screen and Wacom style touchscreen. And if you are a Linux user you can install apps that were already ported to Iliad.

Sales were great, yes. That's mostly driven by visible evidence that the software has been improved with their radical ribbon layout. I'm sure 2003 failed because it offered nothing of value over its predecessors.

That doesn't go to say that people didn't complain about it. The new ribbon (which IS an improvement) meant a learning curve, the new 2007 xml file format was incompatible with everything until they made a patch for other versions, then it horribly failed the OOXML test, and lastly the UK cried interoperability which is nothing less than antitrust talk.

Sales may put investors at ease, but there are enough complaints going around now to make 2007 look like a plain wreck.

is the condom analyser intern position as described by ars technica: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/05/21/robo-gigolo-discloses-the-nature-of-condom-failure

"In the latest study, researchers examined condoms that had been returned by users after they failed - can you picture the unlucky intern's face?-to pinpoint the cause of failure. "

I just get a "Temporarily Closed" page when loading GamePolitics...great timing to move your host.

Ars has a writeup that's a summary of GP's: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080520-judges-report-in-jack-thompson-case-guilty-on-27-charges.html

10 seconds of searching in google turned up multiple results for this item. I'd try either Ars Technica or Shacknews

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. This is a perfect example. You're led to believe by the headline that Apple is doing so well. Next we have folks discussing the obvious problem with PCs and how could they be sinking so low. Then we have a riff on the dollar. But there's still that $1,000 caveat. The fact is that no one NEEDS to spend over $1000 for a perfectly capable PC, present un-representative of the population as a whole company excepted. The fact is that Apple's share has almost always been way less than 10%. The Mac's share was higher in 1983 than it is today. Take a look: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/10

"Mac maker Apple Inc. enjoyed strong retail sales during the first calendar quarter of 2008, boosting its share of the US personal computer market above 6 percent, according to a report released Wednesday by market research firm Gartner.....In total, the Cupertino-based company is said to have shipped over 1.01 million systems nationally, representing 32.5 percent growth and a 6.6 percent share of the US PC market, up from 762,000 systems and 5.2 percent share during the same three-month period last year." AppleInsider

Apple's position may have improved relative to a more recent quarter, but that's a narrow view. If you take an historical view, Apple's computer sales have slid from their high of just over 10% which happened in 1993-1995 or so. It's been significantly less ever since. Apple has always been high-priced, which is why they lost the market to PCs in the first place. They thought their target was IBM when it was actually the lower priced clones that blew them out of the water--permanently.

the fact that they can't ship out the disk-copy to those 3 schools that have computers but no internet.

Cool School was planned to be shared throughout every US elementary schools until its funding was slashed by Congress. The game is now being digitally distributed, and its spread through the country's school systems is much slower than originally intended.

...is on ars technica.

Newer processes have always yielded faster, smaller, and cooler chips. Not anymore. 60nm didn't make chips use less power and 45nm doesn't help either.