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... But one of the criticisms of the eBay feedback system--probably the largest public forum for judging the reputation of a business in the world--is that its ratings are far too positive to be believed.

Go ahead, browse the site. You'll see that the vast majority of sellers have 99+% positive ratings. If you were grading on a curve, a 98% would probably be equivalent to a "C" on a report card--and it's relatively hard to find buyers with this rating. Below 97%? Forget it. No one's going to buy from you.

There are some who point to the consistently high ratings as a sign the system is working. After all, so this line of argument goes, all the bad sellers are simply weeded out. They get bad ratings, they can't sell, they withdraw their sorry little wares from eBay. End of story.

But there's another, less positive explanation: People are afraid of what is referred to in the eBay community as "retaliatory feedback." That's when a seller (or a buyer--it can happen on both sides) becomes annoyed or enraged at a negative comment posted by someone else about them, and in retaliation posts a negative comment in return.

Frankly, this is stupid.

The "vaunted" MS Research team has put out a "concept" OS that doesn't run _any_ applications, and cannot be used for any commercial purpose, and has no indications that it can be licensed. It's only claim to fame is that its an MS OS; there have been 100% managed code OSs before.

Just last month Arstechnica had an article about two similar OSs, except they are written entirely in C#, without the C++ HAL in Singularity.

Both are REAL opensource. As is jnode.

In short, who gives a flaming f**k? As usual, MS is a day late and a dollar short, which is impressive considering that the "research team" working on singularity seems to be 30-40 people.

From the ars technica link below :

QUOTE:"Although the Singularity research development kit (RDK) is available for download, it is not technically open source. The source code is distributed under the terms of the restrictive Microsoft Research License rather than one of Microsoft's two OSI-approved open source licenses."

ars technica

To be "open source" you need a tad little bit more than having the source readable in plain text, IMHO.

Ars Technica says it all.

This OS doesn't really run any applications at all. It's not intended for commercial use, and will not be the next Windows. All it is, is a test bed for future technologies. Think of it as an IT equivalent of a concept car. It doesn't really run, but it's nifty to look at to get ideas for future projects.

Yes, Microsoft can lose a standard war when backwards compatibility is a major selling point.

So, the MacBook Air won't be a hit, the 3G iPhone is on its way, and he bitches about 24 hours not being enough time to watch a movie that you rented?

Seriously, not sure why people still listen to him...

According to Ars Technica, demand for the MacBook Air is strong and they're often sold out.

It's hard to believe that many people would buy a laptop without an optical drive. One of the primary uses for my laptop is letting the kids play games and watch DVD's in the back seat during long drives. (I see no point in spending hundreds on a separate device that's just for playing movies in the car.) When I use it, it's usually for work, but I've watched a few movies on it myself, and I wouldn't consider buying a laptop that didn't have that feature

It might not be the iPhone, but the MacBook Air is selling much stronger than many of us would have guessed. After a full month of being on the market, the MacBook Air is still a difficult commodity to obtain in some markets
(...)
according to the Apple Store sales rank widget, the MacBook Air has been the top selling Mac since before the middle of February, outselling the MacBook, the iMac, and the MacBook Pro--this, despite week-long shipping delays.

I suspect making an engine is part of the reason why Intel bought Project Offset and their Offset Engine:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-why-intel-bought-project-offset-and-the-offset-engine.html

I expect they will be trying many things with Larrabee and the Offset Engine, real time ray tracing being one of those things.

no need, it already passed WGA: http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/06/18/ubuntu-now-even-more-windows-user-friendly

AIR is a cross-platform development environment that also allows easy porting between desktop and web-based applications. Adobe is planning on creating webapp versions of their major desktop software, including photoshop, within the next 5-10 years. How are they going to do this and keep a manageable code base? You guessed it, they are porting them all to AIR. So Linux should get a native port of Photoshop when that effort is completed, whose "nativeness" is roughly equivalent to the "nativeness" of XUL-Runner applications like Thunderbird.

Here is one article on arstechnica that has a little more detail. I'm sure you can google for more.

GREAT article - it is interesting for a non-programmer to read this type of technical detail, presented in an understandable way. For me, right at the edge of my theoretical-only knowledge. A detailed summary, I guess. (oxymoron)

Similar article on NetBSD: Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0 (1/30/2008)

Linux focused links:

Current discussion:
LWN: Kernel
KernelTrap
KernelNewbies: Summary of Linux Changes
---
The Wonderful World of Linux series are excellent history - in-depth for outsiders:
WWOL 2.2
WWOL 2.4
WWOL 2.6
---
Towards Linux 2.6 - A look into the workings of the next new kernel(2003)
Kernel Comparison: Linux (2.6.22) versus Windows (Vista)(2007)

Right, random moron mouthing off on slashdot with the usual "correlation not equal to causation" bromide (which you didn't phrase accurately) must be believed over the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming/climate change. Regarding solar output variability and the recent rise in average global temperatures: read this.As for "I don't understand where these people are coming from saying that warmer temperatures are bad", try asking the people in coastal areas and island nations such as Tuvalu, who have already been displaced, what they feel.

1. This is the first time of which we are aware, in the 30,000 or so cases that have been brought, that a defendant has been able to retain an expert witness to do battle with the RIAA on its main case.

2. The expert this poor woman, who is a home health aide in Brooklyn, was able to retain is one of the foremost experts in the world on the science of p2p file sharing. E.g., he was selected to be the scientific director of the European Union's p2p consortium P2P-Next.

3. His opinion, that the RIAA expert's work was "borderline incompetence", is a very, very strong statement.

Sorry, I think that's newsworthy.... very newsworthy.

Just use kittens instead...

The idea is to present a 3x3 grid of images and have the user select the 3 kittens from the 9 fuzzy animals. That's something computers are still quite bad at... Though you probably need to change the probability of getting it by random luck to be worse than 1/84, in practice.

I can't find specifics, but from this article I would wager it was probably a whole afternoon. I would of jumped at the chance to be there, and get beer money for later. But I can only imagine what Joe Six-Pack and company thought of the whole event.

Look at the courses he teaches. He should know better than to present something like this to the court.

Am I misremembering, or was he the one who in one deposition that he worked with some company that sold P2P-filtering software that the RIAA is trying to peddle to universities? The RIAA is even trying to turn schools into copyright cops, with the linked story being a Tennessee copy of some federal legislation that would do the same thing. Except that the TN legislation more explicitly threatens their funding if they don't "do something" about student piracy.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070621-sitefinder-redux-verizon-tests-dns-redirect-service.html

Next time, try this: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745

Windows Server 2008 will call itself SP1 from the get-go [1] [2]. That may provide one reason to wait for SP2 or SP3.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080218-windows-server-2008-will-ship-with-sp1-installed.html
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx

Ars Technica's article included MP3 Audio clippings of the hearing.

Sadly, from what I've seen as a U.S. citizen, outside of various tech-related sites, it doesn't get all that much coverage. I tend to make a point of commenting on non-tech forums that I'm on if they have an off-topic board, because (in my opinion), anyone in the U.S. should be aware of what the RIAA is up to, especially after all the crap about how making MP3s for personal use is infringing (i.e. the RIAA wants to throw out fair use).

I'm equally impressed by what NewYorkCountryLawyer is doing; I strongly feel that he's a credit to his (much maligned) profession. It's also great to see these types of verdicts; if more judges were willing to throw the book at the RIAA for poorly researched and barely documented cases, perhaps we'd see far less spurious suits.

The quote "without actual distribution of copies.... there is no violation" was the icing on the cake, for me. We need more judges like this.

The RIAA also lost an uncontested case, the other day. This guy not only didn't have a lawyer, he didn't even show up. And the RIAA still lost because it neglected to include any facts, producing only a 'boilerplate' complaint that could have equally well applied to anyone the RIAA sued.

I'd submit this as a story, but it's too much of a rehash now, so feel free to discuss both of the RIAA's losses here.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

that already exists. All 8 series GPUs (the ones with CUDA support) will have PhysX support, since PhysX is just going to run on CUDA. http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/02/15/nvidia-announces-software-support-for-physx-in-all-8-series-cards

I don't know what you mean by "essential buy-in" -- AMD's OEM support has skyrocketed over the past few years. AMD has taken double-digit market share in every area. AMD has reached a point where their products are acceptable to the general public. Talk to the average consumer in Best Buy, and they honestly could care less who makes the CPU, as long as it works. Thus, even with their current woes, AMD's market share has remained consistent.

AMD's woes are from an unavoidable price war it can't afford. Combine the CPU price war with the overall trend towards commoditization in the computer industry, and we have the plummeting of CPU ASPs we've seen these past couple of years.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html

Maybe if the article would link to the actual story instead of linking every word to its definition in order to appease the losers who are incapable of tying their own shoelaces or using google, it would be easier to understand for those of us who actually DO have technical know-how and don't need it spoonfed to us.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html

Basically, pakistan telecom blackholed the network using BGP to advertise that all traffic to those destinations should go to a nonexistant router in their network. Then, instead of keeping that in their own network, they "accidentally" (never ascribe to incompetence what can be explained by rabid extremists) published their route publicly, where it was picked up by the rest of the internet, because the rest of the internet just assumes that nobody would ever fuck up something as arcane and complex as BGP, and makes no attempt to determine whether or not the origination of a given routing rule matches with who should actually be in charge of routing that network.

I for one will not be punishing them for a single bad year.
I actually made the recent decision to buy myself my first laptop. I've already made my choice of OS for it, Ubuntu Desktop (I've decided to begin my transition away from Microsoft). Beyond OS, I know I want 4GBs RAM, and a good-sized hard drive. Last but definitely not least, an AMD quad-core processor. I'm not now nor am I ever going near Intel if I can help it, even if I have to wait until Q2 2008 or later for my laptop.

Silverlight is planned for Linux: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070507-mono-developers-to-bring-silverlight-to-linux.html

What ever happened to researching products before buying them? Is the average consumer so strapped for time that they just purchase the first product to fall under their gaze? My point is that Microsoft had made available information regarding these 'Vista capable' stickers before they started showing up (http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/3/31/3421.) The stickers say "Designed for Windows XP", Goddamnit!

Yep. With Zimbra, Kolab, and Citadel that makes six. However, the magazines and newspapers don't dare write a word about them, even if they would. In addition to being one of the last remaining advertisers, MS has fifth-columnists working against competition in many places. It's not a conspiracy, just greed and/or politics.

There fixed that for you. It's one aspect near the heart of the 10+ year anti-trust trial MS lost in 2004 and lost in appeal for in 2007.

If Windows or any of the products worked with standards, then it would be possible to swap out components. One reason for the extreme suckitude is that the lock-in guarantees no competition. Old habits die hard and going way back, MS DOS 4 sucked rocks a market for DR-DOS which in turn caused MS-DOS 5 which unlike 4 was usable. Same for the Windows-Outlook-Exchange, except now there is lock-in to such an extent that businesses have to be quite serious about dropping MS and getting into functional products.

Actually, to nitpick, capitalism failed spectacularly a while back, at least once, being one of the first methods to fail during the 1900's. Yet it gets propped up again and again. The last centuries have shown us that no single model works. However, there is strong evidence to show that the best pieces of several models can be combined and used together as a sort of Middle Path.

Microsoft is a good example of a company that takes profit from the "loopholes" of capitalism.

Be that as it may, no system can do well with the kind of abuse the MSFT movement is dishing out. The economic damage caused by MS has spread far beyond the IT sector and into nearly every branch of business and government.

By using lock in to their proprietary formats and bundling IE and WMP in the OS, they've achieved to keep for a long time more than 90% of market share on a wide range of products, to force people to upgrade and pay them more money, and all that without innovating (if you really look at their products, you'll see that in the last 5 years they didn't introduce any new feature worth buying, mostly cosmetic changes only). All that just using dirty tactics by making sure no one could create programs compatible or interoperatable with theirs.

I do believe in a free market, but this market we have with Microsoft is anything but free. And I do think governments have the responsability to level the playing field here.

Governments do have the legal responsibility to level the playing field. It's been tried in 1996-1998-2008, 1999-2004-2007, to point out two of the ongoing legal threads, but so far the governments have been all bark and no bite.

The end result from national and local government intervention to-date: nothing but delay.

We have twenty years of governments not being able to force the MS movement to do anything, so it's unlikely to happen now. The situation is unlikely to improve until software users, especially larger customers, vote with their wallets. Until then they are just feeding money into making the problem persist and even grown. Not that a lot of MS 'revenue' doesn't come from buying / selling / issuing its own stock, but adding to it through using the products and services doesn't send a message of disapproval.

No they won't. For that crowd, bribery, collusion and cartelism are all part of the free-market experience, and they like it just fine! Just so long as the gummint doesn't butt in on all the fun.

Speaking of the Gummint butting in... whatever happened to the DOJ's investigation of claims that Sony was deliberately sabotaging the HD-DVD consortium?? (In 2004, no less).

The EU also fined Sony, Fuji, and Maxwell for price fixing... a sign of things to come?

Last July, the EU started investigating why Blu-Ray was winning, wondering "whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back [Sony's] format."

*shrugs*

Bluray wasn't better for me, more storage space for what exactly? HD-DVD was capable of upto 51gb which is fine for any movie even with high quality audio (higher than will make a noticeable difference over most people's sound setups anyway). Of course you could argue that something like Planet Earth might fit on less discs, but it's not the sort of thing I'd watch back to back anyway so I'm only going to be changing discs between sessions in the same way I would for any film. What did matter for me however was a format that was finished, that wasn't going to require me to buy a new player to get access to new features. Also what mattered was being able to get films as cheap as they are in the US/Canada and without having to wait 6months+, something I'm not going to be able to do with Bluray's region locking. Sure Bluray was slightly better technically, but the slight improvement technically was negligible compared to the areas it was weaker in for me as a consumer - that of an unfinished spec, region locking and even DRM that can (and already has) cause issues with viewing the film that I've paid to view. I'd argue Bluray may be better as a generic data format, but for a simple HD video format that the average consumer wants in their living room? HD-DVD really did seem the better, more consumer friendly choice. With Bluray particularly, I, as a British consumer am going to continue to get ripped off whilst having to wait an additional 6 months to get ripped off in the first place or even face the possibility of never getting to watch some films in high def if they simply aren't released in Britain.

Could we do a better job if we could cache intelligently and do p2p and whatever else made sense in the absence of copyright restraints on the setup?

Then fuck off. Thanks ^_^

WoW will go down in history as a classic game.

I would be curious to see a comparison of total man-hours spent enjoying WoW or EVE vs total man-hours spent watching a production of a Shakespeare play. Wow has about 6.5 million players, if we assume a safe average of 100 hours played per player WoW has been played for 605 million man-hours. Meanwhile, In 1600 the population of London was 200,00 by 1700 the population of London was about 600,000 So assuming every single person in London saw two productions of Shakespeare every year, that's only about 200 million man-hours of Shakespeare enjoyed in 100 years. I would say that by some measures WoW is already a greater cultural influence that Shakespeare.

I really roughed in these numbers (but do have sources), if someone who is better at figuring these things would be so kind as to try to supply some better total estimates I appreciate it.

They sure claim they did:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071108-blu-rays-drm-crown-jewel-tarnished-with-crack-of-bd.html

Is anyone actually surprised that on a day that the PS3 and PS2 both outsold the XBox 360, hardware shortages and the Blu-Ray win lead to a perfect storm, and we actually get some numbers on 360 failure rate, that /. doesn't have a thing about it.

Is anyone actually surprised that on a day that the PS3 and PS2 both outsold the XBox 360, hardware shortages and the Blu-Ray win lead to a perfect storm, and we actually get some numbers on 360 failure rate, that /. doesn't have a thing about it.

Ars Technica called the PS3 the "most future-proof player".

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

... on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property on account of this unfortunate event. See this article. Getting him off and getting Lessing on this committee, even as a junior Congressman could have a huge effect in getting good legislation to the floor of Congress that is currently blocked.

You remember correctly.

http://media.arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.media/n64-controller.jpg

I am not sure whether I should be more scared of US or UK Canadian copyright laws. Canada on the other hand, while peeving off some US senators about our independent thinking, is actually thinking about something more reasonable: see here

Speaking to others about the battery life of the Air, my averages turned out to be, well, pretty average. Based on actual use, users I spoke to were getting between 2:00 and 2:45 depending on screen brightness and levels of disk activity. (from: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars/2

I usually keep the screen brightness on the lowest setting out of personal preference, and all I ever do on my laptop (these days) is write and surf--sometimes with some music, and the bit of occasional graphic editing. Those aren't exactly energy-intensive uses, and I can pretty regularly squeeze a good 3:45 to four hours out of a brand new MacBook or MacBook Pro battery. I'll cut to the chase here: the MacBook Air's battery life sucks. A lot. I found it to be a pretty big disappointment, holding it to my admittedly-high standards. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes. (from http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-review.ars/4)

Speaking to others about the battery life of the Air, my averages turned out to be, well, pretty average. Based on actual use, users I spoke to were getting between 2:00 and 2:45 depending on screen brightness and levels of disk activity. (from: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars/2

I usually keep the screen brightness on the lowest setting out of personal preference, and all I ever do on my laptop (these days) is write and surf--sometimes with some music, and the bit of occasional graphic editing. Those aren't exactly energy-intensive uses, and I can pretty regularly squeeze a good 3:45 to four hours out of a brand new MacBook or MacBook Pro battery. I'll cut to the chase here: the MacBook Air's battery life sucks. A lot. I found it to be a pretty big disappointment, holding it to my admittedly-high standards. I ran down the battery from full charge four times and came out with an average of two hours and 33 minutes. (from http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-review.ars/4)

hehehe.. no shit. I don't know if "respect" is the right word though.

This is ironic coming from a company that is either run by crooks or incompetence. How many more people do we need serving jail time in a country where the jails have a high population that some of the states. This sort of stuff, just makes me want to avoid Microsoft products on principle.

At least over in Canada they are considering a more realistic copyight reform.