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Which article? this article? (note the date).

• G & S: production of audio programming and distribution to listeners via cable, satellite or global computer network
  
• G & S: computerized on-line ordering services in the field of music
  

• G & S: Computer services, namely broadcasting music and music information via an electronic computer network
  

You might be able to defend "Hard Radio", but that is where a real Trademark Attorney would come into play.

You never really know how far things like this can go. For example, this recent Supreme Court case was decided in favor of the little guy, but three courts ruled against the little guy before the Supreme Court overturned them all. And the Supreme Court even said that they had to prove that there was confusion and dilution - if they really do have customers who complained to them that they found your site while searching for theirs ...

Either change it, or see an attorney.

Or you could do the evil commie thing and keep your money to yourself and help people all around the world by using free software. Hire that uneployed IT guy on your block and help a programmer make a living. You won't be sorry you did.

Yep, that business about closed source helping programmers make money WAS A LIE. If 70 billion dollars in the bank, pema-temps and H1B slaves were not evidence enough of where this "Intelectual Property" BS was going, Hyperbad should be.

More coverage (copied from USF site):
NY Times,
C|Net,
San Jose Business Journal,
NPR,
UK PC Pro
USF News

...you realize that you have some information that the police might find interesting.

How so? If he's been arrested then they probably have some useful evidence already. Searching the suspect's home for stolen goods is one of the first things they would do. If having testimony about susicious behavior would be useful, I would hope that canvassing neighbors for information would be standard procedure. Most people don't read the police blotter (In many places most people don't read a daily paper). Hoping that someone who saw something suspicious recognizes the behavior as suspicious and reads the police blotter and connects the blotter entry with the suspicious behavior and has genuinely useful information is wishful thinking. It would be rare enough that it's probably not worth considering.

Alternatively, if someone on my street were arrested for possessing child pornography, I darn well want to know about it. S?he may eventually be found innocent, but in the mean time, I don't want my kids playing near their house.

Sheeesh, it's always about the children, isn't it. Unfortunately it's not always about the children. A bogus charge might lead to being refused job offers. A charge can last as a social stigma long after someone is cleared. Even when it's about the children it might destroy someone's career: a child abuse charge against a day care provider, no matter how unfounded, is likely going to severely damage their career. In the particular case you're citing, it's prudent caution that doesn't really hurt anyone. But the general case of making the information available can seriously hurt innocent people who have been charged with crimes.

Good point, but, I've seen some video games with advertisements (and product placements) in them, and there will be more.

Yahoo's own search engine hides paid placement. Not all ads are banner ads, you know.

This raises a possibly interesting point. Any lawyer here who understands the US legal system? Could TSCOG then claim that the US court system is not qualified to consider the main case because of conflict of interest? This seems nuts, but less nuts than any other legal argument that we have heard from them. Any chance of an appeal based on it?

"And C++ programming languages, we own those,"

Geesh. parent poster was not kidding.

Darl: "several dozen requests a month just to come in and see AIX or HP-UX code base."

Didn't they ask IBM to show them the AIX source in their case against IBM? Then what is this about?

Maybe this was the interview where he had to prove to the rest of the 'gang' that he was capable of lying through his teeth without blinking?

Actually, googling around this article a little, extrapolating the trend: Will he sue the US Courts for migrating to Linux next? (btw wouldn't that be some sort of chicken-and-egg problem (ergo very likely for SCO to do)?)

Darl: "NASDAQ, for example, runs all of the trading machines in their brokerages on OpenServer."

Oh, and the trade 'floor' that lists their stock, NASDAQ too? Actually in that article NASDAQ "wants to eliminate the company's Unisys Corp. mainframes and migrate the trading-floor functions that run on those machines" and "Nasdaq currently uses about 300 Unix servers running a mix of HP's Tru64 and HP-UX operating systems as well as Sun's Solaris". I see mentions of Unisys, HP Tru64, HP-UX, and Solaris: Where is the SCO OpenServer that Darl was speaking about? Not mentioned, so not even close to OpenServer on 'all of the trading machines', likely even none at all, given the specific mention of Unisys for trading functions...

Firm seeks to protect ideas

"Our goal is to protect, extend and acquire intellectual property," said Anderer, who's Silicon Stemcell's president and chief executive officer.

"We are very optimistic about our ability to go out and license these technologies in several different ways."

As for DirecTV's vs. Dish, all I know are these few things:

1. My DirecTV HDVR2 has dual tuners which record at the same time. I have heard that Dish Network's DVR only has one tuner.
2. My neighbors, who are currently with Comcast, say they used to have Dish Network, and really hated the customer service.
3. I have always been very happy with DirecTV's service. The video quality is good, the cost is low, and the customer service has always been great. In fact, DirecTV ranks #1 in customer satisfaction among cable and satellite customers.

Plus, if fiber isn't shared, then more will have to be put down (more for everyone). The largest problem I foresee is if is if the applies to power lines as well (which would kill many beneficial deregulation efforts all over the country).

Sierra published the excellent Papyrus NASCAR racing simulators for years, their last one in 2003 (2003 Season). In this series, EA until today is way behind (it's not NFS, it's a *simulation*!) in terms of feeling and multiplayer quality, even with their 2004 version (I have both). So what did EA last year? Locked out Sierra through an exclusivity deal ($$$) with the NASCAR brand. IMO, that's the typical wannabe-monopolist behaviour. The market gets streamlined, mass products instead of diversity and quality.

Face it, Boeing is dying.

Yeah because that $698,000,000 of profit last year is a tell-tale sign of a company that's dying. Damn why is your French aerospace technology so superior to ours!

But it didn't work and some companies started to buy Airbus planes because they were simply better.

Cheaper? Perhaps. Better? I doubt it.

Your government succeded killing Concorde, but it didn't with Airbus.

We killed Concorde? I thought it had something to do with this. Or are you referring to the US decision not to allow supersonic travel over our soil? If that's the case then why weren't their Concorde routes to Rome, Berlin, Athens, or Moscow? Could it be because most people don't like having their peaceful afternoon interrupted by sonic booms?

BTW: Concorde only survived as long as it did because it was being operated at a loss by the airliners for the prestige. Economics killed Concorde -- nothing else.

You're right, I must plead mea culpa, it turns out that, in the January 2002 case that I was thinking of when I wrote the above message ( here and here), the guy who killed four people while driving drunk the wrong way on I-40 had only 9 drunk driving arrests, not 10. I guess that makes me full of shit.

This guy should have been locked up for years long before he killed four people, not after. It's a clear sign that, despite all the talk, the criminal justice system still doesn't take drunk driving seriously in New Mexico. Their solution is to punish the innocent because they don't have the balls to punish the guilty.

I think my point still stands.

I have to agree with the parent. Generally, those who will be affected most are those with some substantial money and knowledge to use sophisticated tax shelters. Obviously, these will usually be businesses (big corporations) and high-powered investors. Typically, somebody making $20K won't have the means or the savvy to cheat taxes with anything more sophisticated than merely lying.

Which is, of course, why some "little guys" will get hurt. I used to wait tables (during college) and many servers would claim only 10% of sales (assuming an average of 15% tips), some would only claim credit card slips (because they are recorded), and some wouldn't claim tips at all. Dangerous because the whole restaurant could get audited, but as far as I know it never did. Of course, many of these people were strapped for cash in one way or another, so it'd be kind of sad how it affects them.

I don't, however, see this as a "Big Brother" thing if there's no direct invasion of our privacy beyond what is already occurring. It says that this tactic collects data it already has and analyzes it to determine potential cheats. The information is already there, it is, I imagine, Massachusetts' right to use it. And at $1M a week, hopefully they put some good use to it.

And hopefully they'll be able to more easily detect and nail Enron/Ken Lay/etc. sorts of investors who act beyond their capacities.

I think that's misleading. My TV is "HDTV-Ready". Who spends all that money on a TV and then doesn't get cable or satellite? And since the latest converter boxes you get from those services are HDTV converters, whoala, I have an HDTV, and I didn't have to buy a set-top box. It would have been a waste of money to do so. Now I have up to 1080i, On Demand (not HD), and all the HD stations are stunning in native 1080i or up-res'd 720p.

So "I have an HDTV", but I bet by their measurement I'm one of those duped consumers because my TV is only "HDTV Ready". Yet buying a full-blown HDTV would've been a waste of money after Comcast bypasses it for their own converter. I think the real dupe is getting people to pay for a converter when it comes automatically with most digital cable or satellite services now. The charged more for it a few years ago, but now it's only a few dollars more than renting the analog box, throw in On Demand, and buying your own HDTV tuner or full blown HDTV with internal tuner is, again, a waste of money.

mostly off topic, but interesting: They make two-wheel-drive bicycles now... you could call these "all wheel drive"

"Costs are driving outsourcing, not the quality of American schools.'"

Yes, and HP has been hit particularly hard by all these costs, haven't they?

Say, what's that smell?

Behold the power of google ... This article describes a specific study about restaurants in central Ohio, but has a quick blurb about businesses overall:

"(H.G. Parsa, the report's author) reviewed other published studies that also suggest failure rates of restaurants to be closer to 60 percent or less after three years to five years."

This is compared to the oft-cited conventional wisdom of a 90% failure rate in restaurants, and 70-80% for other businesses. An early-90s Inc. article says failure rates are inflated because researchers didn't account for changes in ownership -- in other words, just because a business comes under new management doesn't mean that the business has failed:

"after eight years, 54% of start-ups still survive in some form: 28% have the original owners, and another 26% survive with new owners"

Now, that Inc. article may be a little dated post-boom, but the basic concept still holds: *you* may have a great product or idea, and a business you launch has perhaps an even-money chance of surviving ... but you probably don't have the skills to make your product/idea stick in the marketplace.

(I'm wondering what Alan Cox will come up with after he finishes his MBA.)

This place is using old missle silo's for data storage. I just think it was an interesting use. A swords to plowshares kinda thing.

The criminal arena. The first ever "felony" spam arrest, followed by two more spammers surrendering.

A cybersquatter goes to prison for pr0n linking to mis-spelled children specific sites. Not trying to be redundant, but this article is informative.

My personal favorite, "DVD Jon" acquitted.

Down the road you will have people getting sued over "Hello, world!" applications. Let's face it, when a few lines of java-script to annoy people with pop-under advertisements can get a patent, and companies like like SBC are patenting an obvious use for image mapping and frames, what chance does an open source programmer have when some jerk out there will try to patent the use of a ; at the end of a line of code?

Sorry, I'm just too damned cynical today...

Its funny you mention free flight. I'm actually involved with a project at nasa doing research on free flight. Its pretty far out there. I mean you wont see any of this stuff for another 20-30 years but its still very interesting. something along these line is going to have to happen because current ATC systems wont be able to handle the volume in 20 years (not the computing power but the actual number of controlers to man the scopes). One of my friends was involved in this project. Its a step in the right direction but a long way off.

The ATM field in general is going to explode in the next 5-10 years. Pretty much everyone is doing research in this stuff FAA, NASA , eurocontrol , even the commercial companies are getting in the game.

is strictly regulated by the FDA. Not only is a software company required by law to obtain premarket approval 510(k) from the FDA before marketing certain types of medical software in the US, but it is also required by law to document and follow a very thorough software development and validation process.

Although this kind of software is usually not sold to the general public, it is used every day in hospitals and clinics to do everything from analyzing bacterial infections to robotic surgery to radiation oncology treatment planning.

I have worked for several software companies, developing software that is considered a class II medical device. Not only did we have to completely document everything from requirements to validation testing, but we had to keep the documents themselves under version control! Knowing that your software could mean life or death to someone, really puts the software engineering process into perspective.

For two years I had SBC DSL and had no problem, everything was great, good speed, same ip for over a year solid then suddenly I started getting outages, every night, between 6-10pm.

I did everything I knew to fix the problem but it always came back, almost like clockwork at the same time and ended at roughly the same time every night. When things were working the speed and stability was as I'd come to expect, when it wasn't I was basically cut off. I even let my pc sit and ping a server (one of my work servers) while I was out for town for a weekend and it still happened, so I was convinced it wasn't anything I was doing.

Eventually I called SBC and they "fixed" the problem (their explanation "Your phone line has degraded.") by halving my UL/DL speeds from UL 1.5M to 750k etc.

Everything was fine, then a couple of months later, the problem is back. Same problem, same answer, cut my UL/DL in half again to 380k. At this point I start looking for alternative services, alas none are available, and other DSL providers were out they'd be using the same crap lines/equipment that was causing the problem...

Few more months, it's baaaaack...

Suddenly I'm playing $55/month for 128k down with insufferable packet loss (i.e. no meaningful online gaming) and no recourse. Eventually my local cable company finally wired my block and now I'm back to 1.5m so the story has a happy ending for me. Not so happy an ending for SBC as they were nailed in a class action for these very problems, slower than advertised speeds, frequent interruptions, barely functioning Usenet servers...

Read about it here.

As I'd already switched to another provider I was only due $20, but those who were still on SBC could get up to $100 in, get this, credit from SBC for DSL service! If you were so fed up with SBC that you wanted to cancel your service before the one year contract was up that $100 might go a long way toward your cancellation fee.

Given all this frustration I'll never recommend SBC to anyone.

Plus, their phone CSRs have a neverending litany of "We don't have supervisors", "I am the supervisor", or "There is no other tier of technical support available". Great tip to get to someone who knows what their doing in a tech phone tree: Lie just like they do. An (somewhat embelished) example:

CSR: "What version of Windows are you running?"

ME: "Three".

CSR: "Three?"

ME: Yeah, three.

CSR: There's no such thing as Windows 3.

ME: Yeah, there is, I'm looking at it. It's on an old 486 laptop. I've got Trumpet Winsock running and a PPOE client I wrote that used to work fine, but now just lets me connect and ping servers on my local subnet, but ever time I start up a web browser I get a password dialogue and no matter what I type it comes back with some Redback Aggregation Router configuration thingee about "Do I want to commit these changes and reset " or something like that.

CSR: Uh, let me put you on hold for a minute.

That's how you find the supervisor...

-dameron

A high speed west coast train has been announced that is suppose to run from L.A. to Seattle. Article on it

Another one from LA to Los Vegas may also be built.

I once met a lady while on the Amtrak who got on the train in Georgia and had already been on the train for 5 days when I met her in Bakersfield. After 17 hours, As I was getting of at my destination, I asked her how long until she reached hers. She figured she had 2 more days ahead of her. She was going to Seattle. 8 DAYS TOTAL! Talk about torture. IMHO, Current passenger train service in the US isn't just SLOW... it's Glacial.

Sometimes he's insightful but often he's grasping at straws with his ideas. This is one of the latter sort of times. According to this article which is admittedly a bit dated, tablet sales are above expectations and they expect to sell nearly 600,000 this year. This article while intimating poor sales says that Acer has sold 100,000 by itself this year. Cringley's number seems a bit off. That said, he's also off in his analysis. There's a market for tablet PCs. Every delivery person and every lawyer I've seen lately has one. They are great for taking notes. What they are not good for, is video. Even if you could solve the bandwidth issue, there's the horsepower issue. Displaying HD video is non-trivial. It requires a hefty processor (3.0 GHz would be nice) and a GPU to match. Most Tablet-style PCs will come with underpowered mobile PCs and a graphics card from someone like Trident. Sorry, it's just not going to work.

Guess we're stuck with Plan B.

(Just Kidding)

Bush's Justice Dept. doesn't go after his buddies.

Are you sure about that?

Unfortunately, neither did the United States Court System. This means SCO will have to sue the court who will be trying their case. ROTFLMAO! SUCKERS!

There is actually already such a network in place in a rural community. In Grant County, WA, they have optical network connections to the home. This, too, was funded by a public entity, the Grant County Public Utilities Division (GCPUD). Currently, they have a 'cable' provider that. in addition to being an ISP, streams all of the regular 'cable' content (MTV, ESPN, HBO, etc) over this network to peoples homes. The settop boxes for the decoding of the streams are Linux-based boxes, each with a RJ45 connector in the back instead of a coax connection.

I've been up there to see it in action and it is truly impressive. Unfortunately, the majority of the communities don't even understand what they have. There were no DSL or Cable internet providers in the area before this. These people are going from dial-up connections to FIBER. There are TRAILER PARKS in Grant County with thick black cables running into them. It's as bizarre as it is impressive.

Optical network connection for under $20/month? Yes please.

Check here for a blurb on GC's Zipp Network.

It's already in work. There's folks out there with the money and desire to make it happen.

This thing is coming and when it gets here it's not gonna be too funny.

and therefore without revenue.


$32 billion sure seems like revenue to me.

The system makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of the company going public as well as for the individual investor. It works like this: A deadline for offers is set, along with a target price. Investors bid a number of shares they wish to purchase, along with the highest price they are willing to pay. When all the bids are in, the banker starts filling orders beginning with the highest bid. Everyone who bid at that level gets all the shares they ordered, then the banker goes down to the next highest bid, fills all the orders at that bid, and so on until all the shares are distributed.

The bid price where the shares run out is the price everybody pays, even if they bid higher. So in the case of Ravenswood, I bid 12, and got my shares at 10 1/2. (**)

Everyone bids once, so you don't get the bidding frenzy of a typical auction and everyone gets an equal opportunity to buy (unlike eBay).
The company selling the shares leaves less money on the table, because the price they get is set by the auction and not by an investment banker who underwrites the IPO (and makes windfall profits if it can sell the IPO shares for more than they paid they company for them)
And since the market sets the initial price, you don't get those huge first-day runups and subsequent collapses that marked many IPOs in the stock market bubble.
It's even more efficient to do since most of the deal can be done online, and you don't have to pay brokers for schmoozing big institutional investors.

*--I'm enough of a zinfandel fan that my office is decorated with posters signed by winemakers like Joel Peterson ( Ravenswood ), Kent Rosenblum (Rosenblum Cellars), and Matt Cline (Cline Cellars), so I was familiar with the Ravenswood business plan (***) and knew the shares would be a good investment.

**--It indeed turned out to be a very good investment. A coupla years later, Canandaigua Brands (Almaden, Paul Masson) bought out Ravenswood for $29.50 a share, so I nearly tripled my money.

***--They used the proceeds of the IPO to construct a second winemaking facility, so they could expand production of their County series zins, and start making merlot too.

While interesting, this isn't the first time a company has done this. In April, 1999 a company called Ravenswood sold 1,150,000 shares online in an IPO auction. Several other companies since have, including Salon.com and Andover.net. Here's a summary of how they went.

I didn't say all of them were dumped :)

Ask your salesman about them. Ones with people I personally knew who got laid off: the Pittock colo and a colo in a suburb of Seattle.

Or, better yet, try using Google for "colo"+"verio":

"Verio, which last year closed down 25 data centers around the United States, leaving 46 open at the end of 2001, is now planning to shut down all but 10 of its data centers, reducing the count further from the 22 now open.The company also is planning to lay off 650 of its 2,600 workers by the end of this year, according to Verio spokesperson Mona Peloquin."

Make sure that you have a good offsite backup system. I would suggest on a professional outfit like Iron Mountain (formerly Arcus). Be sure to run through some sort of disaster recovery simulation at least annually. The worst thing is having to re-build a datacenter from nothing after a disaster. You may be able to re-build the center, but the data is the really hard part.

While MapPoint is an actual MS product and service, they spun off Expedia. I believe that Expedia is no longer Microsoft owned or controlled.

Having said that, Microsoft sells a Mappoint Web Services (it used to be a big subscription thing with some pretty hefty sign-up fees, but I can't seem to find those pages now) that allows you to integrate MapPoint web technologies into your site. Given that Expedia was, and probably still is, Microsoft technology based, it seems likely that they'd utilize it as a paying customer.

Read about it here.

Fat people make less than thin. Better looking people make more money than uglier ones. More educated/bright people make more money, etc, etc.

This groundbreaking study on height being correlated with salary does not suprise me. For men it is seen that height is "more attractive" (see above). Interesting thing is that more attractive people are seen as brighter and more "one of us", even if the sexes are the same. No, men don't typically say "My thats a good looking guy!", but they do behave more positively towards better looking men.

...that Verisign is selling off Network Solutions. Sitefinder becomes, then, an abuse of network infrastructure to prop up, based on who's buying the company, a troubled business. Shame on that.

I suppose that would depend on application. There was a story on Slashdot-today- about this.

No, this isn't a five year old cluster against a brand new one. The dell supercomputer is brand new - just like the apple one. See http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2003/09/ 29/daily37.html

HH

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kayfox/33472.html :

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/08/11/trainin g.replacements.ap/
US IT workers being assigned to training their Indian replacements.

http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2 002/08/26/daily56.html
Intel holds job fairs for "Redeployed" employess (continuing massive cuts in the US and massive hireing in India).

So, I guess Indians will be the next market for Intel processors, considering Intel is trying pretty hard on its part to leave nobody in the US that can afford them.

Well, that pretty much goes for the entire US economy, in this recession, workers are being laid off due to a lack of sales, creating a larger group of people that cannot afford their products, or even afford living.

How many times can executives say "its not my problem" until it is their problem?

Charter may be the first cable ISP to fight but SBC has been fighting already as shown:

here
here
and here

A little quick Googling...

Although the unemployment rolls declined more than usual between July and August, the labor department said there were fewer employed residents.

But behind the area's rosy unemployment rate is the reality that fewer people are working than a year ago - 2,900 fewer in Escambia County, and 1,255 in Santa Rosa County.

"While the number of people unemployed was lower, employment levels actually dropped slightly from July."

The number of jobseekers declined by more than 17,000 over the month. Sharp reductions were also noted in the number of job losers, as well as the number of jobseekers entering the labor market for the first time.

A little quick Googling...

Although the unemployment rolls declined more than usual between July and August, the labor department said there were fewer employed residents.

But behind the area's rosy unemployment rate is the reality that fewer people are working than a year ago - 2,900 fewer in Escambia County, and 1,255 in Santa Rosa County.

"While the number of people unemployed was lower, employment levels actually dropped slightly from July."

The number of jobseekers declined by more than 17,000 over the month. Sharp reductions were also noted in the number of job losers, as well as the number of jobseekers entering the labor market for the first time.

What Enron did in California (price gouging) was unethical certainly, but legal.

Sorry, I don't have numbers, just press releases...