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Yea, people would be up in arms if Microsoft did anything like this, and EU would definitely be all over them

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Until we (and the rest of the EU) approve this draft legislation:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

Which will be a terrible shame for the thriving re-issue industry that currently gives us reasonably priced high-quality CDs of pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock recordings, especially as the budget labels that do this often treat the material with much more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

I think the record companies are scared to death that the early catalogs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, etc are going to start coming out of copyright in the UK over the next few years. They want to you be more like the US, where Enrico Caruso is still under copyright!

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Unfortunately an EU-wide extension to 70 years is already at the draft stage:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

This is particularly annoying as we currently have a thriving European re-issue industry, where budget labels often treat pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock with more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

Basically, it's important for VOIP to have a certain quality of service for clear voice calls, but different QOS rules may make sense for other data types

Do you remember when the millimeter wave full-body scans weren't going to be recorded? But now they routinely are? Remember when seatbelt laws would only be enforced in conjunction with another type of violation, but now they are an arrestable violation all on its own? Maybe you don't remember these things, but I do, with countless other examples I could name, I see a trend....

If it's possible, they'll do it and they already have (Comcast vs Torrents, anyone?) and the only reason they don't do it more is because people got pissy about it. We need to get pissy about this, too. Somehow, despite lacking all these vital QoS rules, the Internet has grown to become the dominant global information network, winning out over many other networks having such things as QoS enforcement. (EG: Proprietary ATM networks, etc)

Sorry, but I like my Internet the way it is, spam and all. It really needs to be nothing more than a Network of Endpoints all sharing equivalent potential value. Let people decide what's valuable and what's not.

We need to be pissy about this issue.

'Copyright in recordings lasts for 50 years.'

Until we (and the rest of the EU) approve this draft legislation:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/eu-extends-musical-copyrights-by-20-years-eyes-movies-next.ars

Which will be a terrible shame for the thriving re-issue industry that currently gives us reasonably priced high-quality CDs of pre-1960 classical, jazz and early rock recordings, especially as the budget labels that do this often treat the material with much more care and respect than the original copyright holders. See for example:

http://www.naxos.com/labels/naxos_historical-cd.htm

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/01/5971.ars

Potential applications: Subspace radio, wide area networks on a solar system scale. Just think, no more 3 minute wait for a radio signal from Mars or beyond.

companies that are suffering from Microsoft lock-in

The City of Munich is going thru this. The first big hurdle (which they have cleared) was replacing M$Office macros and templates. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/09/5284.ars
(The next big hurdle is getting SAP's stuff to behave with a non-M$ OS or getting a replacement for the closed, proprietary stuff.)
The city's goal is to gain control of the source code for EVERYTHING they use.
They have their own spin of Debian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
(Progress report there on the city's conversion to all-FOSS; they are taking a very cautious, conservative approach WRT the timetable.)

The region of Extremadura in Spain was far more bold. They first converted over to FOSS apps under the payware OS--then in a single weekend switched the whole public sector over to a FOSS OS.
http://www.osnews.com/story/12611
Their spin of Debian is called LinEx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx

...and, of course, there's the classic example from the previous century of a corp getting its tit caught in the wringer with payware licenses and a BSA raid and deciding to get off that junk post haste.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6488047_ITM
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

gewg_ (CAPTCHA: ragweed; How'd they know?)

> W3schools stats are only about browser usage shares of the visitors of that site. Most people don't visit their site, so the stats are fairly useless.

There are a number of sites that keep their own stats. Ars Technica, a fairly respectable technology site, is one such.

Ars Technica recently published this graph from Net Applications stats:
http://static.arstechnica.com/assets/2010/08/browser_share_0710-thumb-640xauto-15643.png

Ars Technica's own site traffic is wildly different:
http://static.arstechnica.com/ars_share_0710.png

Hmmmm. When a a large number of independent sites report visitors using Firefox as a much higher percentage than Net Applications figures, one has to regard Net Applications figures as highly, highly suspect.

> W3schools stats are only about browser usage shares of the visitors of that site. Most people don't visit their site, so the stats are fairly useless.

There are a number of sites that keep their own stats. Ars Technica, a fairly respectable technology site, is one such.

Ars Technica recently published this graph from Net Applications stats:
http://static.arstechnica.com/assets/2010/08/browser_share_0710-thumb-640xauto-15643.png

Ars Technica's own site traffic is wildly different:
http://static.arstechnica.com/ars_share_0710.png

Hmmmm. When a a large number of independent sites report visitors using Firefox as a much higher percentage than Net Applications figures, one has to regard Net Applications figures as highly, highly suspect.

Have any of you not read a superior in-depth, accurate article on a topic because some tabloid had gotten to it first with a lot of crap? Do any of you read Slashdot because you expect to be among the first to read about a "breaking story"?

I'm sorry, are you saying that you read Slashdot for the articles and in depth reporting? I sure as hell don't. Slashdot is just an aggregator aimed at geeks and wannabe-geeks. You speak of accurate, but the source for this article is wikipedia for crying out loud. Slashdot has basically become Digg for geeks. Look at idle for a minute. No really, go have a look at it. The current article at the top there is "Wendy's Robber Calls Back to Complain". Don't worry though, there's always "Fur Flies Over Squirrel Meat Sales" to redeem Idle. What does this even have to do with "news for nerds" anymore? But it's not just slashdot. Look at Ars Technica. Ars used to have great in depth articles like this one about cpu caching, but nowadays that kind of writing is boring, uninteresting ... Oh look, another story about the iPhone 4 and its antenna.

These days I open slashdot and ars, and I get a few iPhone/iPad articles shoved down my throat, some more google glorification, and every now and then Microsoft does something worth mentioning so we all get to stand in line booing at Redmond for a couple of minutes. We get rehashes of rehashes of carefully orchestrated press-releases by companies at slashdot. Yes, we all know what a great fantastical magic thing the iPad is, can we look past the AppStore and tear the goddamn thing open? No, not the rehash of the review of the writeup on the ARM inside. Get your toolkit and do something geeky. It's not about having good articles for a technical or geeky crowd anymore, it's purely for pageviews, advertising revenue and in slashdots case articles that 'll make geeks going through the same old tiring "emacs vs vi", "company du jour is evil", "your programming language sucks more than mine" debates. Slashdot "editors" like kdawnson and samzenpus are a fucking joke, but it's not just them. If 5% of what is on this site qualifies as "a decent summary", it would be a miracle. So when new articles get submitted, editors don't even bother to spellcheck, or check that the links go to a somewhat reputable source, or for that matter that there are any links at all. Do slashdot editors randomly pick things out of the firehose not marked as spam? "Oh my, Bill Gates has tea and biscuits with Jesus Christ aboard a UFO. What a scoop!"

Investigative reporting in traditional media and in depth technical writing has made way for "breaking news"-style reporting, carefully orchestrated press releases, hyping, pageview whoring and such hilarious faits divers like youtube videos of cats putting their paws on iPads and sedated kids in the car on their way home from the dentist. Why? Because there's money in appealing to the masses. Fuck content, let's write another iGadget story.

Is there nothing better to write about on a website that caters to a geek crowd?

Have any of you not read a superior in-depth, accurate article on a topic because some tabloid had gotten to it first with a lot of crap? Do any of you read Slashdot because you expect to be among the first to read about a "breaking story"?

I'm sorry, are you saying that you read Slashdot for the articles and in depth reporting? I sure as hell don't. Slashdot is just an aggregator aimed at geeks and wannabe-geeks. You speak of accurate, but the source for this article is wikipedia for crying out loud. Slashdot has basically become Digg for geeks. Look at idle for a minute. No really, go have a look at it. The current article at the top there is "Wendy's Robber Calls Back to Complain". Don't worry though, there's always "Fur Flies Over Squirrel Meat Sales" to redeem Idle. What does this even have to do with "news for nerds" anymore? But it's not just slashdot. Look at Ars Technica. Ars used to have great in depth articles like this one about cpu caching, but nowadays that kind of writing is boring, uninteresting ... Oh look, another story about the iPhone 4 and its antenna.

These days I open slashdot and ars, and I get a few iPhone/iPad articles shoved down my throat, some more google glorification, and every now and then Microsoft does something worth mentioning so we all get to stand in line booing at Redmond for a couple of minutes. We get rehashes of rehashes of carefully orchestrated press-releases by companies at slashdot. Yes, we all know what a great fantastical magic thing the iPad is, can we look past the AppStore and tear the goddamn thing open? No, not the rehash of the review of the writeup on the ARM inside. Get your toolkit and do something geeky. It's not about having good articles for a technical or geeky crowd anymore, it's purely for pageviews, advertising revenue and in slashdots case articles that 'll make geeks going through the same old tiring "emacs vs vi", "company du jour is evil", "your programming language sucks more than mine" debates. Slashdot "editors" like kdawnson and samzenpus are a fucking joke, but it's not just them. If 5% of what is on this site qualifies as "a decent summary", it would be a miracle. So when new articles get submitted, editors don't even bother to spellcheck, or check that the links go to a somewhat reputable source, or for that matter that there are any links at all. Do slashdot editors randomly pick things out of the firehose not marked as spam? "Oh my, Bill Gates has tea and biscuits with Jesus Christ aboard a UFO. What a scoop!"

Investigative reporting in traditional media and in depth technical writing has made way for "breaking news"-style reporting, carefully orchestrated press releases, hyping, pageview whoring and such hilarious faits divers like youtube videos of cats putting their paws on iPads and sedated kids in the car on their way home from the dentist. Why? Because there's money in appealing to the masses. Fuck content, let's write another iGadget story.

Is there nothing better to write about on a website that caters to a geek crowd?

When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?

soon, real soon. I think they see the decline of Microsoft themselves and are desperately casting around for ways to make money. They will be the next DEC if they can;t get some growth going soon, and they know no-one wants to buy Windows 8, not if they're still (happily) running XP, and not buying Office 2010 or any of the other cash-cows they have come to rely on to get them out of the black holes their other development projects quickly turn into.

So they went for ... ads! Not content with copying other companies successful products, they now want to copy other company's successful business models :)

This is where it starts to gather pace. Although the presentation was to marketers, it still shows their intent: who cares about consumers, they care about the corporates who will buy this stuff to force down the throats of consumers. (I'm sure that makes many an executive weep with joy at the thought - inconvenient reality aside).

Win Phone 7 launches in October as an "ad-serving machine

Pretty soon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows 8 with integrated Bing desktop search that'll search your PC, and the internet at the same time. The results will be displayed to you, with a nice little sidebox (where that dog used to be) with "helpful suggestions and links" (ie ads) all bundled together as an impossible-to-remove feature.

Incidentally Windows Live has been in the business of selling ads for some time. Live Messenger has an ad box at the bottom of the main window and another on the message window. Neither removable.... unless you run the excellent on it ;)

Oh really?

You realize some of the biggest "corporate masters" pushing for Net Neutrality are Microsoft, Google, etc - right?

And that just as many Democrats - Joe LIEberman, these 73 asstard bastards, Jay Rockefeller who recently put forth the "emergency censorship for Da Prezzy" bill - hate Net Neutrality?

Discuss in reality. There's no reason for anyone to vote this on political lines, and the whole "pleasuring their corporate masters" thing is just fucking stupid. The question is whether a certain few Content Cartels - Cox(sucker) Cable, Comcrap, TW, AOHell, etc - can try to run an extortion scam on content providers like Hulu and Youtube.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us-population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone.ars seems to spell out some aspects.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us-population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone.ars
"... federal statute 8 CFR 287.1 (a)(1-3) defines the border zone for enforcement purposes as encompassing an area within 100 miles of the actual border"
They can get to you at any "random" internal checkpoint they like :)
http://www.youtube.com/user/CheckpointUSA some vids of the stops.

No, ablution of patents is best. Many proponents of patents have stated how important patents are to innovation, but where are the economics studies supporting this? While a number of economics studies have concluded there are negative impacts of patents, where are those that claim there are positive impacts? As noted in Ars technica's article Study: free markets superior to patent monopolies the debate has made it's way to Science magazine. To cite one example, in The Patent Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Study of Patenting in the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, 1979-1995, in "Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 32, 2001", based on studies by Yale and Carnegie Mellon "R&D managers in semiconductors consistently reported that patents were among the least effective mechanisms for appropriating returns to R&D investments".

Falcon

If you had RTFA (instead of googling), you'd know what LTE is. It's basically the same speed as 3G, but with 1/4 as much latency for VOIP, online gaminng, and such.

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/03/faster-mobile-broadband-driven-by-congestion-not-speed.ars/2

Some states are considering banning red light cameras altogether, so there is clearly plenty of cause for concern about the issue.

At least one state has already done it.

The scary thing is it's ALREADY happening. Target was sued for their website violating the ADA and had to change their own private business website.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2006/09/7705.ars

As a veteran web developer, I appreciate guidelines on accessibility. Some things are simple. Alt tags, title tags, etc... But to make all of the guidelines mandatory (they have a LONG list) would destroy private business on the web.

I've had what seem to me mind blowing conversations over colors before. Well, we can't make that red because what about people who can't see red. You mean like stop signs and traffic lights? Using the color red is an import visual cue borrowed from the real world. To not take advantage of it hinders our ability to communicate to sighted people.

Another disturbing "guideline" is not to use Ajax. Really? Who is the government to tell me I can't use Ajax on the web. Or whatever future innovation from say HTML5 that we want to use.

But the idea of being sued to change my website, like Target was, to me is truly frightening.

..you do know that all currently WinMo applications will not work with Windows Phone 7, right?

"Microsoft revolutionized the operating system market back in the early 1980s. Indeed, Microsoft created the operating system market back in the early 1980s. Back then, when you bought a computer, it normally had its own special operating system that the vendor bundled (or even sold at extra cost)"

I thought IBM hired on Microsoft to write the OS for the proprietary IBM PC? And didn't a company called Apple bring out the Apple 1I in 1977 some time before the IBM PC in 1981?

Keep in mind that these are different from naked female zombies. We need to pass different laws for them.

It sounds like he's going to use a modified Femtocell. Since you can actually go out and buy these and they route phone calls over public networks, there any many potential points of attack. Considering if someone wants to listen to your cell phone calls and asks ATT nicely ATT will happily given them a room, or anybody with a radio scanner can listen to cordless phone calls and WiFi WPA2 has been cracked in several different ways, no one should be assuming privacy on anything wireless.

Or so Ars reports.

But games? Is anyone still doing games in OpenGL these days, apart from the rare port to Mac or Linux?

Ars technica has actually asked the researchers about the issue. Here is the response from Paul Watters, one of the researchers:

Thank you for your enquiry regarding our research report "Investigation into the extent of infringing content on BitTorrent networks". As researchers, we not only stand by the findings that we have arrived at, but - having made our methodology public - we are providing other bona fide researchers to replicate and/or dispute our findings. Their results can in turn be assessed through the peer review process; this is the process that normal research activity takes.

        You have raised some interesting points that are fundamental to the validitiy of any study in this area: the sampling strategy; verification of results and so on. We believe that our methodology was rigorously applied to the sample that we obtained. Over time, we will replicate the sampling process, so that we will gain better estimates of the population results. This is the fundamental tenet of statistical sampling.

They're out to fuck us on both sides of the aisle.

Didn't nine times as many Democrats say no to this? Here's the link http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/05/73-democrats-tell-fcc-to-drop-net-neutrality-rules.ars

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-big-in-drm-ruling-jailbreaks-are-fair-use.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Forget Apple: Look at what this does to DMCA takedowns!

First up: DVDs! Previous exemptions have been carved out for college professors who might use film clips in class. But note the broad nature of the new rule--it applies to everyone. As long as you are making a documentary or noncommercial video, you're in.

The exemption only covers "short portions of motion pictures," since the Register was not convinced that longer portions would necessarily be fair use. And if there's some other way of getting the clips short of bypassing DRM, you should take it.

If this were really such a cut & dry partisan issue, why have 70+ democrat members of congress also asked the FCC to drop it's plans to impose net neutrality rules?

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/05/73-democrats-tell-fcc-to-drop-net-neutrality-rules.ars

I'm not a big fan of the FCC having this power, and not because "I'm a republican," (I'm actually not, in point of fact), but because I see what moronic regulations the FCC has imposed on television & radio. If you look at the "content controls" they've enacted on those formats, is it all that hard to imagine that they'll soon be tasked with "content regulation" on the internet as well, in the form of mandatory parental controls & staggering fines on sites deemed to violate some obscure and arbitrary FCC ruling?

They do it with TV and radio today. If you give them the same control over the internet, I won't be surprised to see them attempting the same regulations there within a few years. I'm all for the concept of net neutrality, but I'm not convinced the FCC is the body best suited for 'regulating' a 'free and open' internet. I'd like to see a dramatic limitation of their powers to impose anything more than "thou shalt not filter or shape traffic," at the very least.

I'm sick of hearing about the drunken pirate. From the more neutral accounts I've read, She wasn't kicked out of the student teaching program JUST be cause of the photo. Her supervisor had cited (on her past performance reviews before the photo) a lack of professionalism and a lack of understanding of the subject matter she was teaching. The pirate photo AND complaints about her supervisor on her myspace were just cited (in the story) as the last straw. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/12/court-rejects-appeal-over-student-teacher-drunk-myspace-pics.ars

However, if I ever lose my job - I want to get her lawyer. He's done a great job of turning this from "I'm crappy at my job and don't get along with my boss, and I got fired" to "OMG look at me I'm being repressed".

"For the love of money is the root of all evil."
    -Quote from a somewhat popular book

It would be reasonable to say that a significant percentage of people involved in the game industry do it for the love of being part of the game creation process. Programmers, QA personnel, and managers put in crazy hours to fulfill their personal dream of inspiring somebody else with their game. Once they get a great game that sells well, all of them are on top of their game (pardon the pun). Their eyes start filling with visions of being able to live the good life and being able to do what they love. Time passes and more great selling games get made and these people are rightfully feeling like gods of their own domains.

Enter the investors and business people. Their sole purpose is to make money. They do not care how it is made, what widgets are used to make people shell out money for said widgets, only that the widgets generate the maximum amount of profit given the amount of resources used to make said widget. A very significant percentage of business people are only interested in the game of making money, nearly everything else is secondary. Specialized (and sometimes even general) knowledge of those widgets is not necessary at all.

In the case of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick is on public record stating these very things. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/01/activisions-bobby-kotick-brings-cash-but-not-heart.ars When he talks, he isn't talking to the consumer, he is talking to the investors - although I do believe those type of people delude themselves into thinking they are talking to the consumer base. The investors are the most important people you need to make happy to be able to make those large sums of money. By now, the consumer base is so large that a few missteps in execution will be absorbed by the sheer number of consumers. Just as long as the quarterly balance sheet is an improvement over same quarter last year all is well in the money making world.

Meanwhile, the people who have sweat blood and guts getting the company to where it is are dismayed at the change of direction the company is taking. They like the extra money and the even better benefits because the families they have now demand such things. They internally file this under mid-life crisis and buy a big toy for themselves to sooth the ego bruised dream of making a difference in the world through their passion. By now, the patterns of malcontent from the consumers and the many compromises in game design is way too frequent to ignore. The more brilliant people of the core team that made the company great have seen the writing on the wall and have already formed new opportunities for themselves (exit strategies), while the ones not so confident are basically biding their time and polishing their resumes. It is no longer a joy to leap out of bed ready to attack the day with finishing up whatever game related task you may have. You go into work dreading whatever the new edict comes down from upper management. Your life has reached The Dilbert Level(tm). Congratulations.

Eventually, the game company spends of all the consumer good will that was accumulated during the glory days. Even the "sheep" consumers are leaving because there are better games out there. The investors spit up the company and sell the pieces and leave with their bags bulging with money while the soon employed ones are left wondering what the hell happened.

I just hope that Diablo 3 has enough of it's roots in the pre Activision days to be a good game. I already know that it will be the last ActiBlizzard game that I might purchase.

Users don't read dialogs. They try to do whatever possible to dismiss it as quick as possible, without reading it. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/01/54734.aspx http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/09/study-confirms-users-are-idiots.ars

As well particularly verbose errors are ignored. The whole thing is a big problem because it makes it very difficult to protect users against themselves if they willingly agree to install malware, and ignore security warnings. This is why fake AV software "XPAntivirus 2019" and the like are so successful.

If you can't find the book but still want some Amiga history, Ars had a good series a few years ago.

The actual comparisons that were done when the core duo imacs were released show that isn't the case at least for core duos that were available at the same time as the G5.

That link you provided is comparing the performance of a SINGLE CORE Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz to a Dual Core G5 2.5GHz. Furthermore it is comparing them running PPC binaries. So not only is it down a processor and a slower clock but it has to translate every instruction with Rosetta on top of it.

A reasonably clocked C2D or any Nehalem should be vastly faster than a G5.

The actual comparisons that were done when the core duo imacs were released show that isn't the case at least for core duos that were available at the same time as the G5. That is, unless you're saying that a modern processor is faster. Well, of course that's true, it's always been true for any chip, and has nothing to do with the G5 per se.

What do you think "the spirit of Android" is? You do realize that Android is provided under the Apache license, not the GPL, don't you (it's only the Linux kernel used by Android which is GPL)? Based on that "the spirit of Android" seems to include implementing it in a closed, proprietary manner.

Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about ... but that's nothing new.

Because if someone is using something like a Nokia 7020 it might be nice to get a smartphone. I didn't have a smartphone under my employer "gave" me one. (No, I don't work for MS)

Fact: 20% of Microsoft employees have an iPhone. They could have bought a Win-based phone, but chose not to. Why would they switch? Because it's free? Here - I've got an old Stinkpad that I'll give you for free if you switch from whatever you're using now.

Then again, like always, Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance," said Ballmer. "It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Guess who is quickly rushing to the bottom to be the new 2-percenter. Hint - it's not Apple or Android or RIM or Palm. Of those, Microsoft is only ahead of Palm in new sales, and that will change once HP does their thing. HP has great corporate presence, as well as heavy lines into consumer sales (that comes from selling a lot of laptops and printers through retailers). Microsoft will be out of the mobile market in 2012, when their new market sales, already under 8% , drop below 1%.

How many lemmings queued up overnight to buy the first iPhone? People were willing to go first-gen (with their own nickel) go get a nifty smartphone. I'm sure many would be more than willing with someone else's nickel.

And we called them lemmings - it's not the same as being not so subtly forced to use a crappy, already-outdated-before-its-even-released POS like WP7 when you have something better.

Apple had [url=http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/01/analyst-apples-us-consumer-market-share-now-21-percent/]21% share in 2008[/url]. Plus the increases that have been reported since equals to about 30%. It is some estimation on my part because the real numbers have not been released since 2008, unfortunately. Either way, it is significantly more than 8% in the consumer market.

There doesn't seem to be much actual info in that article and it only relates to the consumer market, which has been vaguely estimated without citation. It also assumes that no sales of apple computers were to enterprise. Better to look at more solid statistics that relate to the whole market.

I want to know something.

Why are we all worried over 7 republicraps when yesterday it was 73 paid-off democraps doing precisely the same thing?

The problem is ALL OF THEM, corrupt boobs on both sides of the aisle, not one side or the other. Sheesh.

it really doesn't matter that a retail ISP doesn't keep logs... their upstream providers already have all their traffic mirrored and monitored by the NSA.

Ah, I see you live in a country that actively feels that the most draconian laws against people in regards of IP are perfectly sane.

Go read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

And this: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2010/07/unanswered-questions-unearned-trust.ars

Thanks.

Windows 2000 is now completely unsupported. There will be no hot fixes, no security updates, and no paid support. The support expired with the last monthly patch.

Also, Windows 2000 seems to be less than 0.5 percent of all Windows machines connected to the Internet, according to this Ars Technica article.

While supporting IE 6 may have some residual value for those XP users who have not gone to IE 7 or IE 8, even Microsoft is encouraging people to move to the latest Internet Explorer.

In short, it may actually be an opportune time to drop support of IE 6 (and all of its attendant rendering bugs) when developing new web sites.

Note, your stakeholders may have a different take on this. I'm just mentioning that from a technical viewpoint it's becoming harder and harder to justify spending the effort to hack in IE 6 support.

Here is a link about it

I know, we can call it "Bitterface," because of the experimental Btrfs support.

Fiber to the premises is almost always an "all or nothing" service. This MAY be why this story is so interesting, that someone is leasing wavelengths to a building. But from the very sketchy info given it sounds more like a typical MAN with updated hardware. They didn't say anything that indicated they were providing last mile termination to this network, only backbone services.

This article from Ars Technica gives a great break down of the costs associated with building out a 100% fiber network (FTTH) and is also a darn interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing. The basic summary is that it is nearly impossible to compete with infrastructure that's already paid for and has cashflow. That's what Verizon is finding out with FIOS: even though the maintenance costs are the same (if not cheaper), even with slightly higher margins, it's nearly impossible in today's capital markets to raise enough funding for a new network.

Ars Technica recently ran a story on how non-transparent they've been since they gave out their official release in April, along with further links.

I would think they would use and advanced version of this technology and be able to use the full screen to send individual ads to each person in the area at the same time.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

He is just upset that when the RIAA cracks down, some users will not have gotten a complete Floyd album.