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I try to be fair to these companies, but the salmon on doubt keeps nibbling on my toes... For a thought experiment, suppose California's e-Waste bill goes through, and suddenly the responsibility for disposal is removed from the consumer?

First, I won't be surprised if California signs this one, as it would clear the State from the costs of disposal, clearing up lots of tax dollars for the other social programs in their nearly-bankrupt budget. The Politicians can then say, look at all the money this bill saved!

Second, I don't see "distributor" named, I see "manufacturer". With a quick Google search, I can see that Hewlet Packard happens to own advanced supply-chain-management software, where HP can purchase cheap parts from other manufacturers, put them in their machines, then scoot them out the door. Quote: "A plastic printer cover, for example, may start its life overseas as goop at a resin manufacturer, which works with a plastics compounder to provide the material to an injection molder. That injection molder, in turn, sells its finished parts to a manufacturer, which puts the product together for HP."

Wouldn't you think that since HP out-sources so much of their manufacturing, what's to stop them from saying, "I didn't manufacture this, our records show Wang's Plastics did, so it's their responsibility to manage disposal!" HP, and all the other big "Silicon Valley" computer companies will just pass the buck back to the original manufacturer, HP will keep their profits, and the little supplier will be hosed.

This is the generally accepted but largely forgotten version of history. While MS did the relatively simple task of copying an OS from IBM, Compaq et al did the much more complicated job of reverse engineering, against IBM wishes, the BIOS. Legal battles were fought to give Compaq the right to do so. Compaq won, and thus the PC market was opened. MS did little to facilitate this process. Once the BIOS was cracked, anyone could write the OS, and many did.

The ironic thing is that MS is working the IP cartel to rewrite laws so that such reverse engineering of hardware,and software cannot happen. History indicates the high prices we might have to pay if IBM was allowed to protect their BIOS. I think we can look at things such as the DCMA, the XBox, and DRM, and wonder if we are going down the same exploitive price road.

sims (on Usenet)
about 611 000

sims
about 2 850 000

mozilla (on Usenet)
about 1 170 000

mozilla
about 5 400 000

Mozilla fans, verging-on-obsessive, upset that Jimmy Guterman wrote: "How many of you use Mozilla as your Web browser? OK, both of you can put down your hands."
more than bloody two!

You once turned down $10 million to sit on the board of a Linux-based software firm. What part of $10 million don't you understand?

The $10 million I understand. I don't understand the people who think it's more important than anything else.

there's and article in Buisness 2.0 about the success of Google's text-only ads.

K5 also has unobtrusive text-only ads. More websites should follow this example; the ads don't get in your face and they work. I know I've clicked on a few, and I've not clicked on one of those hideous flash ads.

those new shirts and pants that repel water-based liquids. They use a similar idea, add a bunch of hydrophobic polymers to the surface of a fabric in such a surface density that water cannot penetrate the fabric. However, this only applies to water-based liquids (i.e. wine, juices, etc..) Check it out, there's an article at Business 2.0.

here

One of the earliest models of the universe was erected by Ptolemy.

It worked fairly well, except for the fact that it assumed that our planet was the center of the universe and that everything rotated around the Earth. As astronomy got more sophisticated, we had to invent ever more elaborate mathematical models to make Ptolemy's picture of reality work. The astral cycles of heavenly movement became cycles within cycles within cycles. Until finally Copernicus suggested we imagine the Sun was the center of the system. The way we conceived the workings of the universe literally shifted and it was simple again both in perception and in mathematics.

The present moment in physics has the whiff of Ptolemaic epicycles about it. Perhaps the universe is actually incredibly complex and incomprehensible. Or, just maybe, it is our models that have become complex and incomprehensible. Perhaps new theories will yield ways of seeing things that are not as simple minded as the clockwork universe of the 19th century or as illusive as the unimaginable world of the 20th century. In our new understanding of the relationships of the very large to the very small, we may literally revisualize the universe around us.

I do have to say that a blue LED mouse looks about 10X cooler than a red one.

Here's Why

After reading this article yesterday, I pondered changing the LED in my mouse. Has slashdot implmented some sort of psychic cookies or something?

interesting story here.

Somewhat interesting article about blue LEDs and the science that got us here.

I'm green with envy, all you blue optical hipsters ;)

You want what Bill Gates wants.

I have news for you. Microsoft doesn't give a crap about Linux or OS software and whatever insignificant market share they have.

Ballmer: Linux Is Top Threat To Windows

Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat

Ballmer: Microsoft sees the Linux challenge

You mention that "lots of big companies" are starting to deply Linux to the business desktop. Name a few.

Wall Street Embraces Linux

Linux for the Rest of Us

DreamWorks switches to HP, Linux

Secure Linux desktop begins shipping to UK police force

They already made a phone that played MP3's according to this article (linked to in a previous comment). And that phone failed.

It doesn't say if it was 128MB or not, but the idea isn't completely ignored... although it might be for a while now after one failure.

Their engineering culture pretty guarantees that this innovation will keep going.

In addition to our WAN/LAN I also run a medium size phone switch (195 nodes / 16 IP Phones / 2 PRIs for switched access / 1 dedicated Long Distance T1). When you get to the corporate level you're buying a solution; not building one in house, because phones are essential to the day to day operation of the company. Period. I think generically when you say phone switch you're referring to everything telco past the demarc; switch T1s/PRIs, operate internal digital stations, provide analog lines, route calls, manage security, reporting/tracking/billing, Voicemail, Auto Attendants, Hunt Groups, Digital Faxing- the whole 7 layer enchilada. Few corporations are going to allow their IT departments to go the Slashdot way w/ so much on the line. A modern phone switch must reliably scale to thousands of nodes including IP devices, support Unified Messaging (receiving faxes & voice mails through PC), have reporting right out of the box, must be easy to use, and work on the first cut over. While the word 'easy' is certainly a very relative word- in my experience most geeks (a word of complimentary endearment in my vocabulary) can easily master telco while the reverse is not often true. Believe it or not, in the old days these were sometimes the roles of separate administrators / departments.

You're right that *nix is a perfect fit for all of this; remember Unix was invented at Bell Labs. The auxiliary applications are there; to support your phone switch you need to reliably record and report all activity across your switch for billing, acct. tracking, etc. I would guess that *nix runs the backbone.

If you'd like you can become a dealer for the company that claims to have 'the world's first Linux technology based voice processing' including Unified Messaging.

By the way I think that Bayonne is encompassed in the umbrella project of GNUComm; hopefully it's just a matter of time before someone finishes the Embedded Linux Phone Switch. As an incentive to anyone who develops and releases a free system: even used handsets cost big money for a particular phone switch; pick wisely 'cause you're most likely stuck with it for a little while. Caveat: you will most likely be pushed out of the market by softphones.

Since you're in the market and I just went through this myself contact me off list and I'll share my experience with Inter-Tel Technologies which is one of the fastest growing companies in the US (short version: no I don't work there and overall positive).

I'm reading so much these days about Microsoft shutting down Lik Sang for creating XBox mods. So, I was very happy to find this story on Valve, who have supported the total conversion of Half-Life into Counter-Strike -- and made some good money in the process. I hope this open source movement will continue. It's really a win-win situation for everyone.

I also found the same story at business 2.0.

This story is a good example of how complete mod can definitely benefit the original manufacturer.

here's the link to counter strike article

Actually, they're available, just not seen commonly. Basically, it boils down to: if you have AA and C, why would you need the rest in between?

That design idea stuck; at least according to this Business 2.0 article.

No, the future is Digital Pants ... a so called, Smarty Pants.

Actually you may be right.

Here is a Business 2.0 article on Lessig's idea.

(copy/pasted below):

Utility on the Bounty
Issue: August 2000
Print Article | Email This Article

If bounties helped free the Wild West of outlaws, why not use them to liberate the Net frontier from spammers? That's what Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig proposed last May at the Spam Summit 2000 in Washington, D.C.

Lessig's idea rests on legislation requiring valid labels on unsolicited commercial email--or spam. The spammers who break this code would be fair game for bounty hunters, who could track the culprits and collect rewards based on the amounts ISPs would expect to recover in court. Individuals could get in on the action by forwarding their "outlaw" spam to companies set up to trace the messages.

"We have to be more pragmatic and experimental in our approach," says Lessig, adding that a bounty system might also bridge the gap between the legislation camp and the technology camp on how to curtail encroaching spam, which cost ISPs millions per year just to keep to a slow stampede.

Congress is working on a spam bill that requires labeling but also gives ISPs the right to enforce their own spam policies in civil court, something Lessig views as disastrous because it would require emailers to know the individual policies of ISPs.

As for a bounty? "We already have a lot of intelligent people who spend time tracking down spammers pro bono," says John Mozena, co-founder and vice president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "When you throw money into the equation, you start running the risk of vigilantism. I don't think that would be productive." In the eyes of some, though, running spammers out of town might not be so bad.

Slashdot covered clockless chips briefly a few months ago. Why do they make sense? To learn why, let's compare computers to real life industry.

In the 1800s, industry was limited to a few very large factories and workplaces. Over time, these factories became bigger and bigger and faster and faster, until eventually it became impractical to make everything in one place. So.. things were decentralized. Now when your car is built, the raw materials come from Brazil, the parts are made in Taiwan, then the cars are built in America.

Processors are headed the same way. Things are becoming decentralized, and the load on the processor should, therefore, go down. The giant leaps and bounds with video cards have actually caused CPUs to have less work to do. No longer do CPUs have to do nasty 3D calculations.. the video cards do it!

Clockless chips work very well in decentralized situations, since they operate based on incoming data, rather than to a clock. This means thousands of non-standard components can work together to produce the same result as one CPU.

Even -car- engines are becoming decentralized now with specialist automatic gearboxes, electric backup motors, and psuedo-petrol engines in the Prius and Insight. With processors it makes even more sense.

References:

Business 2.0 article on Clockless Computing

Economist article on Asynchronous/Clockless chips.

Business 2.0 also has an article on Sun's N1 that takes us from the beginning of N1 to its present state. Computing to the Nth Degree Sun Microsystems is betting its future on a radical new technology called N1. If it works, it could revitalize the troubled Silicon Valley pioneer -- and change the way the world thinks about computing.

Consider, what if there was a chain of record shops (start with a small number and grow) that allowed customers to create their own CDs by pulling songs (along with lyrics and artist info and such) from a large (and continually growing) database of artist contributed music. For each song copied from the database, the artist(s) get a royalty cut and the record shop gets expenses (CD, jewel case, personal lyric book, personal artist info book, etc.) plus a small profit. This is similar to (if I remember correctly) the Personics model of "make your own tape".

It seems likely that your chain of DIY record stores would suffer a similar fate, or (if it tried to run without formal permission, like Napster did) get sued out of existence. Sorry.

After reading this, I imagine whatever install they ship will have some special sauce added.

this clip is from Business 2.0:
<clip> Ultimately, however, 3G and Wi-Fi should be able to coexist. "The technology is actually very complimentary, because they are not truly competitive technologies," King says. "I expect that mobile carriers will purchase some Wi-Fi providers, and we'll start to see some integration." </clip>

From the article, a Colombian drug cartel uses IBM AS/400 mid-range EBCDIC systems, incorrectly called mainframes. Hey, you can't get much more proprietary than that! At least they are dumping some of their dirty money into a supporter of GNU/Linux, half-hearted as IBM's free software instance is no, wait, IBM does software patents, so they are evil!

Suddenly, open source geeks who care about source, not necessarily freedom, discover the world is a complex thingie.

Columbian tech

As I've said many times before, a really good alternative for them would be building computerized kiosks that let the customer burn his/her own selection of songs onto a high-quality CD - and pay for it by the song. (Probably by taking a resultant printed receipt up to the counter/checkout lane with the shiny new disc)... I would think most retails stores would absolutely love this idea, as would consumers who can finally buy their own "custom mix" CD

And for the record, I did make heavy use of these machines back in high school. I'd create mix tapes by a dozen bands I was curious about but hadn't yet heard -- the Sugarcubes, let's say -- and come back later to buy full albums by the bands I ended up liking. (Mind you, this was before the popularization of both the Internet and in-store "try-before-you-buy" listening.) Pretty much the same thing a lot of people use Kazaa/Gnutella for today -- a sampler platter. And the labels would opposed a CD-based version for all the same reasons.

Shame, really...

Why is this course so popular? First of all they choose the best professors and lecturers to teach it. They are able to explain things clearly and they are very personable/funny/approachable.

Second, the programming assignments are well designed. I always knew WHY I was doing a particular assignment. I have since helped people from other universities with their CS assignments and I can say that assignment design is a big deal. Some profs just throw some random problem at the kids without thinking about the purpose of it. They don't provide clear goals. They don't provide any libraries to use. The documentation provided with assignment needs to be clear and complete.

The most important reason that these classes were both popular and productive was the section leaders. These were CS students in their senior or junior year that taught section once a week. The position was prestigious and it paid well. They got some of the best CS students that way. It is describe briefly in this article. (Search for CS198 if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The sections were very productive. You would write code to do some particular task and the section leader would help/critique. There was almost always a section leader "on call" in a cube in the lab that you could go to for help on an assignment. More than one near the due dates. They could find a bug in 2 seconds flat. But they would just show it to you, they would "help" you see it yourself. But the most important thing they did was "interactive grading". They would go through a printout of your code line by line and write comments both good and bad while grading your program. Then they would have a 20 minute one one one session with the student and explain what was good and what was bad about thier coding. Whether the program actually functioned or not was of secondary importance, especially early in the quarter. They made sure that your code made sense, was well documented, that you had variable names that made sense, etc.

Many schools just give grades based on functionality and never even look at the code produced. This sink or swim attitude might bring to light a few naturally good coders. The mentoring aspects of the program at I just described produce a lot of great coders.

In summary:
1. Choose good instructors.
2. Give assingments with a purpose. Document them.
3. Give the students detailed feedback and lots of support early on whether they think they need it or not.

According to former and current DEA, military, and State Department officials, the cartel had assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. "They could correlate phone numbers, personalities, locations -- any way you want to cut it," says the former director of a law enforcement agency. "Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans."

They were. A top Colombian narcotics security adviser says the system fingered at least a dozen informants -- and that they were swiftly assassinated by the cartel. A high-level DEA official would go only this far: "It is very reasonable to assume that people were killed as a result of this capability. Potential sources of information were compromised by the system."

Sounds like in the war between the cartel's and the gov.us, the cartel's have won. It seem's like they ownz you US folk already...

Whine mode: When I submitted an article on this and IBM's entry two weeks ago it wasn't interesting:
2002-07-03 17:22:22 Your Next Desktop: the Size of a Deck of Cards? (articles,news) (rejected)

There's a teaser at Business 2.0. Another fluffy article is at TechExtreme. The best coverage, on C|NET, came out in April.

I think that if we start teching are kids at a young age in school about the wonders of atoms and subatomic particles that we would have more smart people that can help with major breathroughs in the field. If we have more people in one area then we can tackle problems very quickly. Like get 1 million nanotechnology proffesional one very critical problem that is made of lots of problems but still has one ultimate goal. For example have all of them work on nanobot's. Once we get them then we can build more specilized teams and break them up into sub thinktanks. Basically give more grants and let more people know about nanotechnology. Make atom realated topics a daily part of your life and tell everyone about what you know. We all know nanotechnology will solve about every problem we as a race have and our planet has. So why not invest more now and train more people. Forget about money. The USA has plenty of funny money. The USA is in debt $6,121,692,487,637.44 as of 08/07/02 at 8:15:15 A.M. GMT. Check out the current debt here. A lot of people think give it time and we will have more break throughs. I think though if we are that much in debt then why not through more debt money at nanotechnology. When we make a couple of breack throughs sooner then it's finances now then we can pay off the debt without a problem and turn the usa into a money making government then we will be more powerful and money will not be an issue because we can just make whatever we want out of sand or whatever cheap easy to use aboudend substance we can use. It's just my opinion that we can make thinks happen a lot faster then they are now. Give nanotechnology a trillion or more dollars of funding. The pay off is so good that we should not even be thinking about the money. Think about mankind and how many things we can solve that will make all of our lives better. We have the powor\people\money to do it now so why don't we.Good article on what nanotechnology is.

didn't bother will spell check or grammer. Screw it, hehe.

Whoa. I didn't realize what I said was so controversial. OK, my opinion, in short: It's better to try to maintain things as the original author intended them to be viewed, out of courtesy for the original author. If you want to provide a link to the printer friendly version, that's all well and good, but you should make your primary link be to the ad-infested article. Something like According to the story [Printer friendly] would be OK, in my opinion.

Obviously, there are some cases where the author's originally intended view conflicts with the best way to read the page. In this case, it's a judgement call of whether the courtesy of maintaining the author's intentions outweigh the difficulties caused by maintaining those intentions.

I am not saying "You have to watch the commercials, because there is an implicit social contract", or anything silly like that. I mean, does anyone think that way?

(Note: I use the term author rather loosely.)

Whoa. I didn't realize what I said was so controversial. OK, my opinion, in short: It's better to try to maintain things as the original author intended them to be viewed, out of courtesy for the original author. If you want to provide a link to the printer friendly version, that's all well and good, but you should make your primary link be to the ad-infested article. Something like According to the story [Printer friendly] would be OK, in my opinion.

Obviously, there are some cases where the author's originally intended view conflicts with the best way to read the page. In this case, it's a judgement call of whether the courtesy of maintaining the author's intentions outweigh the difficulties caused by maintaining those intentions.

I am not saying "You have to watch the commercials, because there is an implicit social contract", or anything silly like that. I mean, does anyone think that way?

(Note: I use the term author rather loosely.)

th printable version - which has all th text on one page
and less advertising and graphics - is here

in general it is a nice courtesy
to link to th printable version of stories
when this option is available

(this is not meant as criticism of th submitter of this story
- i appreciated yr submission)

Regardless of stock price, Apple for years has had a great cash position. At their worst low point, their stock, while at $12/share or something had a $11/share cash position. Basically, any company that wanted to take it over was getting it for $1/share instead of the market of $12/share.

Pretty crazy.

Info on their stock and cash position is here

thanks unicron...is there a 'clearly missed the reference' meta moderation? Although i'd have been more correct to say "rotten in Denmark," rather than "fishy" -- perhaps we're dealing with a purist.

or maybe that someone is towing the line that _nothing_ is rotten in denmark?

c'est la vie.

You couldn't be bitching that Intel is trying to ensure no more copyright extensions for media giants like Disney: Intel's Amicus Brief for Eldred vs. Ashcroft

You couldn't possibly bitch that Intel's Andy Grove and Leslie Vadasz have been THE most vocal tech company in the fight to protect our consumer rights against Disney's Michael Eisner pushing the CBDTPA bullshit and and closing the analog hole: Hollywood vs. High-Tech and EFF Applauds Intel's Stand

Perhaps you are disturbed that Intel didn't whore itself to Microsoft in true AMD's Jerry Sanders fashion to help alleviate Microsoft's legal woes AMD chief testifies in Microsoft's favor followed by the very coincidental Microsoft support for Hammer Microsoft To Support AMD's Hammer

As far as marketing and time to market go, I can't think of a more formidable opponent than Intel. Hoping Intel will fail in this arena is futile. And hoping they will fail for ethereal political reasons is absurd. And thinking that a quake demo against a 1.6GHz P4 underclocked to 0.8GHz and memory bandwidth equally underclocked is any indication of "suck ass" performance is pathetic.

You know when you have to tie both hands of your opponent behind their back to give him a fair fight, you've got some serious problems of your own.

Oops. Bad link. here is the Business 2.0 article.

Ok, here's some more booth babe links here they are! and here! more and more here too here's a documentary on the species and here's an interesting article including interviews with the babes

The companion piece to this article, Untangling the Future, is also pretty interesting.

Similar grassroots Wi-Fi networks exist in Hawaii and in Portland, OR.

Heh, Trademarks are the only "IP" that actually are analogus to property, they have scarcity value. Others can't copy them without damaging thier value, to both merchant and customer.

Copyright and Patent, on the other hand, are flat out monopolies. And they were never intended to protect the individual vs. corporations. Which is good, because they never have.

Patents could still serve the original purpose (getting people to contibute useful inventions that they hold secret into the public domain), though the system badly needs reform. (example of why: The Patent King) Copyright is just plain obsolete, as far as the original purpose goes; Any author can publish themselves on the Internet for neglible cost, publishers are no longer needed as gatekeepers. As for insuring that authors get paid, Stephen King has tried variations on The Street Performer Protocol with satisfactory results (he was satisfied, he's the author, his is the only opinion that counts).

This was a helpful analysis to correct the one concerning Microsoft's battle with Sony from the "Beating Bill" article at Business 2.0 . In that article, the author felt that Microsoft was succeeding against Sony because:
a) they didn't get it wrong right off the bat (as one former Microsoftie opines, "If version one of a product does not suck, it's game over."
b) the Xbox has more power hardware
c) it has an ethernet port intrinsically
d) it has the potential to be a future digital hub
e) a survey that states that 27% of PS2 owners intend to buy an Xbox

Intel has consistantly FOUGHT digital content mgmt from CEO on down (See recent Business 2.0 article asking Is this Man (Andy Grove) is Pirate )
AMD has said nothing on this and argued on Microsoft's side in antitrust court - and MS is very intent on installing in content mgmt. Wake up.

Does IBM's move to Java pose a threat to Windows? Tell us.

Cryptonomicon notwithstanding, does anyone have some links to these myriad of investor lawsuits that everyone in Silicon Valley is so terrified of?

Here you go Lerach and his copycats file hundreds of them a year.

Amusing note for /. Lerach wants to copyright his lawsuit filings, since he claims people are taking them, replacing the names and refiling them. Heh.