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It's impressive that these rivals have banded together to address click-fraud, but don't forget that Google has other tricks up its corporate sleeves. As seen here a little while back, they are also looking into "cost per action" ads, which would eliminate the fraud unless the action itself could be performed in a fraudulent manner. (Bruce Schneier mentioned it in a commentary about click fraud.)

Yes, there was/is an amnesty. It applies at least to machines that had Windows pre-installed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6590518/
http://www.betanews.com/article/NonLegit_Windows_U sers_Get_Amnesty/1115239342
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+proposes+piracy+amne sty/2100-1016_3-5466487.html
Cheers!

Now lets see how much they'll pay to all the people whose PCs have been crippled by all the malware kazaa dumps on their computers.

FTFA: We have won another battle in an ongoing war," said John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI). "We move forward with a spring in our step."

All they have to do now is get all those undead offenders to pay up.

Oh great, they retracted the article too!

But more seriously... you can still download it here: http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Microsoft_Pri vate_Folder/1152200243/1 (redirects to download.microsoft.com) all that was removed was the HTML download page.

On a related note, are the legions of ZIP tool companies going to retract ZIP encryption or password protection? Other archive format encryption schemes? How about general encryption programs? Oh f***, I wrote a DES implementation once, I'm screwed now aren't I?

There was no damned reason to go from Win2k to WinXP, but many did.

Most people didn't go from Win2k to WinXP; they either went from Win9x, or its their first computer.

... or maybe you've forgotten all the ads for new business machines with WinXP that also offered "downgrade rights" to Win2k, because businesses didn't want to switch?

Heck, I know some people who are still running Win98 - they've recently gotten a new box (it has XP on it) and they want me to install linux on it. Why? Because its just as easy to use as XP, has more features, and doesn't need a virus scanner, whereas Vista will always be broken compared to a real system. Its already over 4 years late, and the competition hasn't been standing still.

Just a few hours after MS releases Virtual PC as freeware

Has anyone compared both?

Actually, Adobe was the bad guy here. They wanted to charge users for the "create pdf" button:
"Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the feature, which the Redmond company has refused to do. Smith said Adobe threatened to file an antitrust suit in Europe, and his company was preparing for that eventuality. Now, however, Microsoft says it will make the feature available through a downloadable add-on."
From: http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_to_Drop_ PDF_Support_in_Office/1149284222

Dell does ship Firefox with new computers. I bet it reduces the number of support calls for removing malware, and possibly reduces Dell's costs.

... Firefox Usage Passes 15 Percent in US

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_to_Suppo rt_OpenDocument/1152166759 "In a surprise move, Microsoft is bending to pressure from governments and will sponsor an open source project to build tools that enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument (ODF). The forthcoming Office suite will also support an add-in for saving directly to ODF." I have to go scare some pigs off my roof that just flew in....

360 sales in the month of May * 3 = 663,000
PS2 sales in the month of May * 3 = 696,000

source

TFA didn't say it, but other sources do:

The fine will be applied retroactively from December 15th.

This means on July 12, they will need to pay 209 * 2.0M EUR = 418.000.000 EUR, or 524.339.200 USD. Following that initial payment, they will continue to pay 2 million EUR each day.

It doesn't state anywhere whether the fine applies only to business days, or also to weekends and holidays. I've assumed it also applies to weekends and holidays since the laws are just as applicable on these days as on any other day.

Every Blu-Ray player runs a copy of Java ME.

That's a load of BS. If Microsoft cared about open formats, they'd just use the perfectly good ones we've got now, like OpenDocument, PDF, OpenGL/OpenAL/SDL, Java, Ogg, Vorbis, FLAC, Theora, HTML (as opposed to "MSHTML"), NFS (as opposed to SMB), and god knows how many others.

Now, if they were making non-standard PDFs that required a Microsoft application to use them, that would be another story. But that is not happening. All they were trying to do was exactly what people here (or at least, the parent poster) are asking, to make their stuff so other (non-MS) applications could work with them. They did, and are being sued over it. It's all about money, and power. There's no pot of money in open source and only a small marketshare which is why Adobe isn't suing open source applications that include PDF generators.

All that I can relate is my 'user experience' which is that Adobe actively breaks the PDF standard and/or extends it to break it every few years.

They added new features and new ways of doing things. Such is the cost of progress, you sometimes have to change things.

my investment of $300 is now crippling, because my Acrobat 4.0 won't 'read' the newer PDFs that many organizations are now 'publishing'

That's what Acrobat READER is for. You can have both Acrobat Professional (say 4.0) installed for creating PDFs and the latest reader (or even a 3rd party program!) to read the latest PDFs.

I do NOT want to throw away my editing/creation tool by downloading some crappy 'free reader.'

You don't need to! You can have both installed at once!

Don't believe me? Penn State has both installed on all of the lab PCs on campus. Still don't believe me? See for yourself.

(If you have a Mac I can't verify that you'd have both installed; PSU just has professional in their labs. But it seems like Macs would be even more open to having multiple versions than PCs.)

Also, the Adobe "free" readers have lately become gargantual bloatware monsters, with spyware links and nagware built right into the menu bar.

Then use a third party tool. There are a ton. Ghostscript. Foxit. Or use Acrobat Speed-Up to make it run faster.

Also, at least in my experience, Acrobat Reader 7 is a substantial improvement over 6, so they're getting better about it.

(BTW, what spyware? What nagware in the menu bar? There's a Yahoo link and a item in the help menu to purchase Acrobat, but if you take offense at those I suggest you get a life.)

Just remember, Alienware is really a Dell is sheeps clothing!

I suspect that the real reason Microsoft is making these statements (and it's Microsoft, not Adobe) is that they are having second thoughts about including PDF writing in MS Office. They have their their own system now and they're probably looking for an excuse not to include PDF in the final release of Office 12.

It seems to me that Apple, in contrast to the opinion of some, has priced the iPod very competitively. Creative is losing a ton of money by trying to maintain slightly cheaper prices for its competing lines. In some cases, actually, the iPod is priced just the same or slightly less. It is a losing battle for Creative because they do not have the economy of scale that Apple has with the iPod, so they lose money at these prices while Apple does well. In this case, Apple has a Dell-like supply chain.

This article, from over a year ago, says it all: "Creative Responds to iPod Price Drop." Apple took the offensive by cutting prices, and it has continued this strategy. As an analyst in the article says, "Apple has left little room for other music vendors to compete on price." Creative followed that strategy nevertheless, and the results are very clear: Creative cannot sustain a price battle with Apple and stay in business. Their third-quarter sales fell to $225.7 million compared to $333.8 million for the same quarter the previous year. Their net loss for the quarter was $74.7 million. For the past three quarters, it was $105.4 million.

Simply put, Creative is in serious financial trouble. The recent legal action against Apple smacks of a desperate strategy to use their trump card -- their GUI patent -- to shore up their finances. Their problem is that this patent is being challenged and there is a very good possibility that it will not stand. A hierachical system for organizing a music library is just too obvious to be the intellectual property of any one company. Apple has the legal team to drag out the process as long as possible. Their countersuit is just the first step in this process.

Dirrerent strokes for different folks, I've got 200+ msn contacts. about 3 yahoo, no aol no aim, no icq.
br/> Who uses MSN? 61% of all IM users according studys.

http://www.betanews.com/article/MSN_Messenger_Most _Used_IM_Client/1144778820

With MSN + installed it's got all the features I need from an IM client.

Can you point to a single example -- just one -- where an innocent party has chosen to settle with the RIAA?

Actually the article says (1) 85 of 905 people with tumors were heavy cell phone users and (2) this translates to a 240% increased risk. It doesn't explain how this risk was calculated, but the only way to do it would be to compare with the general population.
I couldn't find the actual study (I'm guessing maybe it's only been published in Swedish), but the following article confirms that the study included "an equal number of healthy individuals". http://www.betanews.com/article/Study_Tumor_Risk_f rom_Cell_Phones/1143823783
It's definitely not enough to prove that cell phones cause brain tumors, but it's worth looking into.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_No_Vista _Code_Changes/1143232877

Microsoft: No Vista Code Changes
By Ed Oswald, BetaNews
March 24, 2006, 4:05 PM

Microsoft slammed an article by Australian technology publication Smart House on Friday, calling it "speculation." The retort came as a result of a story that cited sources within the company saying as much as 60 percent of Vista code needs to be rewritten.

The article claimed that the Redmond company had to transfer developers from the Xbox team to the Windows division in order to ensure the Vista makes it to a CES 2007 release. Much of the article centered on issues with the Media Center and multimedia functionality, and claimed Intel was assisting Microsoft in rushing out the new code.

Relatively unknown outside Australia before this week, Smart House made waves in the blogosphere and throughout the Apple enthusiast community with a story on Tuesday. In that article, the publication cited an unnamed BenQ executive as saying among Taiwanese manufacturers, the existence of an Apple "iPhone" is "common knowledge."

"This is speculation with no demonstrable basis in fact," a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews on Friday. "There aren't any Xbox developers moving over to the Windows Vista team," he said, disputing the core premise of the story.

Representatives with Intel could not be reached for comment.

Microsoft said that Vista is "feature complete," which means that the code writing process is basically over. "The next phase of development focuses on security, testing and fit/finish - not writing new code," the spokesperson added.

The company also reiterated its prior shipping targets -- to business in November, and consumers in January 2007.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_No_Vista _Code_Changes/1143232877

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_No_Vista _Code_Changes/1143232877

From Important Stuff section under the submit button

"...Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)..."

What the hell is an "Illegal" message?

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_No_Vista _Code_Changes/1143232877 http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/rewrite -of-windows-vista-underway-hogwash/

And Intel chips don't run hot?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-726366834 6151253701&q=pentium+4
Intel has been screwing stuff up since the infamous FPU bug on the pentium. They even tried to cover it up. Later, they gave into customer demands and replaced the part that they shipped even after they were aware that it had a broken fpu.
http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~dusko/cs63/fdiv.html
Most of the code that didn't function on AMD chips back in the day was on account of Intel intentionally hobbling code for AMD chips.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Suit_Intel_Sabotag ed_Compiler_for_AMD/1121274628?do=reply&reply_to=7 1938
AMD is the only company innovating right now and the only one that has channel partners instead of victims. Intel is run by a marketing scumbag who only cares that people believe Intel chips are better instead of actually having advantages. Sure, they developed a lot of chips since the 8086, but their size has definitely gotten to them. Ironic that their ticket away from being a sole-source provider, AMD, who they later tried to crush by withdrawing 386 licensing, is now going to pawn them down to size.

Anyone wasting $9k on a so-called gaming computer ought to have enough sense to know that Intel chips are far lower bang for buck, require far more cooling, and have developed a habbit lately of being rushed out the door since Intel is desperately trying to at least look like they don't have an impossible ammount of catching up to do.

Dell would not have wasted their time acquiring Alienware if they didn't want to sell AMD. The Dell marketing machine is powerful enough to win the hearts of those dumb enough to buy gaming machines with Intel chips. Dell needs more than brand name to get the rest. Of course, the smartest people can put together their own rigs and don't pay a premium on parts just because of a snazzy case. And the true enthusiasts probably lean towards hacksaws and spray paint to achieve the individual effect.

Actually we should not just compare DVD vs Blu-Ray (or HD DVD) on price just yet. What we have here is a capacity comparison. Lets start with the following:

Floppy disk (1.2MB) - yes you can get larger but they are now pretty much obsolete. However they were good for their day. Lets not go into 5.25 inch, 8 inch or even (gasp) 12 inch floppies .

CD (650 - 800MB) - still useful for Music, install software and some backups. Look like hanging around for a long time. I doubt we will see a Music DVD put out by the Music Industry anytime soon.

DVD (4.7GB) - at the moment this media is very cheap (sometimes cheaper than a CD). Dual density is a lot more expensive though. Still 4.7GB is a very useful size (PC and small size backups including movies) although certain companies would like to see this killed off, I personally this won't happen for some time, since there are a lot of DVD/Hard-Disk player/recorders on the market which have really started to kill off VHS recorders. You could probably start a new Slashdot article just on this alone.

HD-DVD (15GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

Blu-Ray (25GB) - this is single layer proposed for HDTV.

For HDTV the industry is proposing 15GB to 30GB and this is were the above two fit in. You won't be able to put a HDTV show on standard DVD without some loss (normally considerable) and this is what the Entertainment Industry wants. In addition what is also wanted by the Industry is DRM and the best one will have a definite edge, although the PS3 will be will be the Trojan Horse that puts BluRay in the living room.

Holographic DVD (1.6TB) - http://www.betanews.com/article/Holographic_DVD_to _Hold_16_Terabytes/1133197797 The specs are incredible however I cannot see HDTV being put on this. Where this will shine is in Small to Enterprise backup solutions and this is exactly what it is aiming at. Basically this puts the backup tape industry on notice since it now becomes very possible to have close to "near-line" recovery. Those people who are responsible for serious backups should welcome this.

Please don't come back at me suggesting disks to actually do backups. All I can say to that is try to backup 100TB and put that off-site cheaply, while taking into account possible disaster and recovery scenarios.

Comparing DVD to any of the above is rather silly and as far as costs go, the new media will come down eventually. Even today if you compare RW DVD to Write once DVD you are looking at approx 10 to 1 in cost so if the new disks are say $15 to $20 each for writable only it does not take much effort to imagine what the price of the RW ones would initially be.

Apperently it hasen't been paused...

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Updates_ Vista_Design_Tools/1142277862

Care to elaborate?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829355,00.as p
http://www.betanews.com/article/Analyst_MS_Office_ Formats_Not_Open/1107211516
http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/006232.ht ml

The latest figure I can find that's not from Joe's Weblog puts the figures around 1.5 million in late january.

With this much of a slump in projected sales you may soon get a free XBox 360 with the purchase of a carton of Camel Lights.

Gates is certainly limping away from this one like a dog that has been given a savage beating by a drunk on some high power amphetamines.

Although it almost pains me to say it, I'd think that some of the computers should be left running Windows. After all, it is a school situation, so my guess is that the point of the computers is to familiarize the students with them. Since the vast majority of computers they'll work with in the near-future will be running Windows, they should certainly be exposed to it. Of course, since children tend to learn new skills rather quickly, it would probably also be beneficial to introduce them to Linux. Later, if they need to use a Mac (for example), they'll probably figure out how to use it much quicker than someone who'd only used Windows. Perhaps Linux could be installed on the older computers and Windows left on the newer ones. If the Windows machines have the processor cycles to spare, run a local firewall (restricting traffic based on port and origin/destination) and perhaps something like System Safety Monitor to keep unauthorized programs from running. With these two safeguards, I have my doubts as to whether a virus scanner or spyware detector would be necessary (assumming IE and Outlook aren't used and the students don't have admin rights). Software might be a concern, but teaching the children to use a "Word Processor" rather than just "Microsoft Word 2000" would probably also be beneficial. As for other educational software, I'm not familiar enough with it to comment one way or the other.

I suspect the die-hard AOL users would in fact, keep AOL once switching to broadband. Why? Because they were never smart enough to have switched from AOL to a traditoinal dialup ISP.

AOL has just enough exclusive content to keep a lot of people coming back for more.

The last time I looked (about a year ago) they had dozens of forums that were filled with posts. Obviously those folks prefer those forums to having to search the Internets(TM) for similar forums elsewhere.

Heck AOL dumped Usenet and that didn't seem to cause a mass exodus.

AOL is the only remaining survivor of the "Online Services" and there are enough people out there who feel they need that sort of thing they they will stick with AOL, regardless.

Steve, just promise me you won't break any chairs of fucking kill anyone when your little wet dream does not work any better than Xbox or tablet PCs.

the market has chosen features over minimalism (it always does, BTW). No matter how ridiculous it is to watch movies on a 4" screen, this is what consumers want and Microsoft answered a call while Palm actually tried to tell consumers that they actually would not want to do that.

PDA sales are in the dirt right now. I suspect it has something to do with a planned lack of choices outside expensive but underperforming WinCE machines and constantly breaking Windoze syncs. Those losers can't even get handwriting recognition right. Saying that Windoze mobile has won in a market like that is not saying much. They might have "won" but they did it by killing the market and it's not going to get any better till choice comes back.

Oh yeah, one more reason for poor sales is good devices. I'm still happily syncing my handspring visor with Kontact and KPilot and those programs continue to improve it's capabilities. Here's three cheers for marking contact birthdays in my calendar.

What a stupid comment. AT&T is spending a billion on advertising campaign. Can you please go ahead and make the same rationalization about them?

I suppose the question is whether Apple's X86 hardware will boot Windows

Some info on this.

Office has a 5 year additional life on the Mac, but MSIE and Windows Media Player are terminated, including the support. Which, IMO, is good news. WMP is not good, navigates poorly on DVDs, and v9 and 10 cause random freezes and even crashes on WinXP PRO. At least on two (different) laptops I have. I've had to stop using it for DVDs.

Looks like the music/movie industry is really hurting now. You would think they would let up on crushing the little guy Nah!

Not all of the HD-DVD demos were a bust.

BetaNews has some screencaptures of HD-DVD running on a Windows Vista PC (playing the Bourne Supremecy).

It's mostly a profile of "iHD", which as I understand it is a mix of EMCA Script and XML for the titles and interactivity of HD-DVDs.

(Oops: a link would help: http://ces.betanews.com/entry/HD_DVD_and_iHD_in_Ac tion/1136757415 )

including "Serenity"!

via betanews
Universal Pictures announced at the HD DVD press conference in Las Vegas Wednesday that it will have 10 titles available for the high-definition format's launch this spring. The studio will issue new and older movies on HD DVD throughout 2006. Initial releases will include six new movies: "Jarhead," "Doom," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Cinderella Man," "Serenity" and "The Bourne Supremacy," along with four older flicks: "The Chronicles of Riddick," "U-571," "Van Helsing," and "Apollo 13."

incase one of the links goes down, http://www.betanews.com/article/5198_Linux_Windows _OS_Flaws_in_2005/1136328858 there is where I read the story yesterday, amazing that slashdot found it this fast... usually takes several days.

It's very old news. You should be used to reading old news by now. After all that's why we all come here, to read the very latest in yesterday's news... twice.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Infinium_to_Launch _Gaming_Lapboard/1135788337

Even a small portion of their goals could be beneficial for everyone, including all of us outside Sweden. Despite the A that stands for America the RIAA is a global organization (their recent attempts to pressure Russia about allofmp3.com should leave no doubt of that). So when any country forces the RIAA to adapt to different laws it makes similar laws more viable elsewhere, even if just slightly.

Imagine concert sales doubling in Sweden after such a change, or an influx of new artists as the country becomes the next Seattle. That's what we all think/hope would happen if intellectual property laws were relaxed, isn't it? That could be persuasive to the domestic powers that be.

And if nothing changed, or if the lack of intellectual property laws made things far worse well then we'd have to finally shut up about it, lol.

Wow, I can't decide if this might be more embarrassing than when they sued a stone-dead grandma.

Bittorrent and the MPAA made peace, didn't they?

http://www.betanews.com/article/BitTorrent_Hollywo od_Reach_Piracy_Deal/1132701192

Yes, it was.

"Touting the success of it's new Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) process, Microsoft late Wednesday said Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2 Professional and Embedded have secured the highest Common Criteria security certification from the United States government's National Information Assurance Partnership."

Unlike what people would like you to think, XP SP2/Windows Server 2003 is exceedingly secure. I think we can all agree that IIS 5 was utter crap. However, IIS 6.0 is a total renovation.

The "industry-wide" investigation likely centers on whether the four major record labels colluded to set the pricing of song downloads on iTunes and other online music stores. Currently, songs are usually priced at a flat 99-cent rate, but the industry has pushed for higher prices.

Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Happened About 4 Days Ago?

On a sidenote: instead of the folks at Google adding new functionality of doubtful usefulness (autoresponders are the root of all evil in the corporate environment, right up there with running MS Exchange servers), can't they please finally let me delete or archive more than 100 messages at a time?

You can actually do this already with Windows Server 2003, but with Longhorn Server you can install a "Core" server that has a 500MB footprint and no GUI:

http://www.betanews.com/article/Next_Windows_Serve r_Gets_Modular/1126826261

Are you referring to the much touted "Monad"? MS announced Vista won't be shipping with their new anticipated scripting shell. http://www.betanews.com/article/No_New_Command_Lin e_for_Longhorn/1118333463 Reminds me of pre-95 bragging of FAT32, which we didn't get until Windows95b shipped 3Q 1996.

So, I remember reading somewhere that the new DVD's are really hostile to end-user rights. Bill Gates says so, so it must be true :)

Personally, I think whatever DRM is included by the megacorps will just get broken anyway, so I don't see the point. Remember region encoding in DVD's? It's trivial to circumvent.