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The japanese don't *buy* diesels much, but I believe the japanese manufacturers sell them in europe. According to this random google result, toyota puts diesel engines in "just" 36% of its cars. (I'm not sure if that means "available in 36% of models" or "sold in 36% of cars assembled" or what)

A diesel Prius with a roof rack would be pretty close to what I'm after. How 'bout it, Toyota?

Apple has managed to snap up most of the available flash memory being produced by Samsung and the other manufacturers. They have also arranged sweetheart pricing deals with the same manufacturers. This leaves almost no flash memory left in the supply chain for other portable player makers to use in their units. And even if they can get them, the prices Apple is paying for their supply allows them to price their products lower than the competition. If the labels want ANY kind of digital music sales (which remains to be seen) they'll have to work with Apple somehow.

Read this article for more details on why Apple will remain in the driver's seat when it comes to iTunes pricing. Here's a key excerpt:

Having secured a large chunk of the supply of flash memory from Samsung and Toshiba and a price break from Samsung, Apple is going to constrain the supply for flash chips. That's going to make it difficult for competitors making flash-memory-based players that work with other music services to get their products on the shelves this holiday season.

How bad will it be for Apple's rivals in the music-player business? A research report by WR Hambrecht says manufacturers of flash memory will be experiencing an uncomfortably tight supply environment this quarter and into the first quarter of 2006. Samsung and Toshiba both have their second- and third-tier customers on allocation -- which means lots of smaller companies will be told to get in line and wait for their flash chips.

And it may only get worse for those companies. Analysts at UBS Investment Research suggest that Apple could get an even bigger price break on flash chips from Samsung, and Toshiba may give it favorable pricing as well, making it even tougher for others to compete on price and amid constrained supplies. Rumors are also buzzing that Apple may soon tie up even more flash supplies by cutting a deal with Hynix Semiconductor.

..... regardless of how many iPods are affected. The mere mention of this issue caused it's stock value to nosedive 4.4% yesterday. (Surf to HERE for more on this)

Part of the problem is that Apple has become a MP3 player company, and not a computer company. According to most people in the know, they don't turn a profit from their music store and the so-called halo effect of the iPod is of limited value to them. And then there's the Merrill Lynch downgrade to neutral from buy that they got this morning (Click HERE for more) because "although Apple's recent performance has been extraordinary, there are question marks over the effect of the imminent transition to Intel-based hardware."

Not good if you're an Apple investor.

Didn't Google have high profile legal troubles with France? 1 2 and the famous 3 Perhaps MSFT chose France because it seems the less Google-happy place on earth.

You'd be right (if you were talking about net profit, which you weren't), except that the "$100 profit" figure comes from this article, which, you'll notice, does not include the costs of:
* Packaging
* Shipping
* Retail margin
* Advertising
* R & D

So, in other words: no, not really, the various parent posts are throwing around terms incorrectly.

Is there some reason why large companies can't resist the temptation to acquire AOL? First Time Warner's notoriously ill-fated merger, right as broadband was emerging... Now Microsoft? I realize AOL has a large number of subscribers, still the most of any ISP, but according to Business Week, they lost 900,000 subscribers just in the second quarter! As broadband becomes cheaper and cheaper, why would anyone stay with AOL? Are they even getting any new subscribers? That article also mentions AOL's goal to become a web portal, with AIM, AOL Music and MapQuest drawing users in. AIM I imagine is growing, as new preteens start using it all the time, but does this really make them any money? There's advertising on the client, I've never heard of anyone actually clicking it, or even really noticing it. MapQuest is okay, but I imagine people will gradually switch to Google Maps. I've never even heard of AOL Music, but it doesn't look like anything spectacular. And who would ever use AOL for search or free email? I think anyone under 35 wouldn't even think to look there. Perhaps that's what these companies don't understand: AOL, and really MSN as well, make most of their money off of customers' cluelessness. As customers get clued in by friends and relatives, they'll move to better services. The customers you have left will use one hour of Internet time a month and will probably eat up any profit AOL could make with their tech support calls alone.

Google did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the lawsuit. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., said in a statement that it respects copyright.

"We regret that this group has chosen litigation to try to stop a program that will make books and the information within them more discoverable to the world," the company said.

It said authors and publishers can exclude books from the program if they don't want their material included.

Google has said it offers protections to copyright holders by limiting users of books covered by copyrights to bibliographic information and a few sentences of text.

The company also has said it will direct readers who want more to booksellers and libraries.

One would think that the author of the BusinessWeek article linked in the summary would've
1) seen the man's credentials
2) been able to spot a fake

when meeting the blogger in person.

:-)

In an interview very reminiscent of that other fool, Ballmer struggles to stay 'on message', repeats his key words and phrases out of context ('Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!') and generally makes a fool of himself.

There have been a lot of reports out of Redmond to the effect that Microsoft is being strangled by internal politics and endless meetings. The most recent report, and a very significant one, is a cover story article in next week's Business Week magazine.

In that article, Ballmer comes across as being out of touch and in denial of the problems. It is no wonder why Microsoft is unable to put forth a coherent and consistent strategy on anything.

I've read a number of books to my kids using my Fujitsu Stylistic and have several GBs of ebooks and texts on it. The kids like it, and it's very convenient (no wondering where the book is, or what place I was at since the reader (I use ybook (.txt) and mu-book (.html) and the Adobe (formerly Glassbook) eBook Reader (.pdf))

Take a look at sites like http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/ and you'll find lots of people using tablets for lots of reading and studying.

And look at John Mark Ockerbloom's Online books page for an exhaustive list of what's freely available.

It's unfortunate that innovative things like Corbis' Leonardo CD-ROM w/ its cool translating, mirror-imaging magnifying glass didn't stay the course for when tablets became available (reading the Codex Leceister from this on a tablet is an amazing experience). For a glowing review see: http://www.businessweek.com/1996/49/b350428.htm c.f. http://www.mmi.unimaas.nl/people/Veltman/articles/ leonardo/Review%20Leonardo%20da%20Vinci.html for a more even-handed review (it's not a perfect experience, and I really wish it wasn't hard-coded to run in 640 x 480)

Voyager had the right idea with their ``Expanded Books'' it's just that they were a couple of years early.

William
(who really needs to find the time to get his wife's copy of _The Manhole_ running in a Mac emulator on his tablet)

FYI. This one touches slightly on the same subject: ways in which big companies fall. See The Innovator's Dilemma; describing "When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail".

Interesting read, though not perhaps directly applicable to Microsoft since it's really huge, multi-faceted and monopolistic which makes it less subjected to the competition and disruptive technology.

Also on BusinessWeek there's an interview with Ballmer where he dodges every question he's asked (and re-asked) regarding morale issues at Microsoft, competition, release delays with Longhorn/Vista, etc.

Oddly he didn't jump around screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!" this time around.

I never heard of Carl Icahn till I read today's posting. He's the 49th richest person in the world according to Forbes.His political contributions are to both Republicans and Democrats. (But mostly to Dems.)

Some people would say he's a Wall Street predator the way he bullies companies like TWA. He's got such a big pile of money he can influence companies like Blockbuster. The same guy thinks he's the closest thing a shareholder has to a friend. Even serious analysts admire him.

He's even part of XO Communications and tried to takeover the ailing Marvel Comics. There's a book about it called Comic Wars.

"You learn in this business: It you want a friend, get a dog" - Carl Icahn

Given that Digital Research wasn't exactly going anywhere with graphical UIs, I rather doubt it.

DR-DOS 5 had a cut down version of the GEM GUI. There's no reason to assume that wouldn't have led anywhere.

If Microsoft hadn't crushed Netscape, perhaps Netscape's vision of network applications in the vein of XUL would have come along years earlier

Or, more likely, we'd still be stuck with the craptacular Netscape 4.x and 6.x releases that were so godawful bad that Internet Explorer was an massive improvement.

The reason why Netscape 6.x was so bad was because the Mozilla project gave in to the geeks and decided that, although the world had been quite happily implementing GUI applications for years, not-invented-here was a terrible curse, and so they felt the need to develop their own GUI toolkit based on XML and Javascript.

If the Mozilla project was driven by actual business needs of a competitive browser vendor, I think it's very likely it would not have fallen into this trap. Netscape no longer being such a competitive browser vendor is directly attributable to Microsoft's illegal actions.

up until about a year or so ago the compatability wasn't high enough to recommend it to non-geeks.

Comptibility with what exactly? Internet Explorer oddities. Oddities that wouldn't exist had Microsoft not been in the market. This is another example of Microsoft's presence in the market holding back competitors. If Mozilla didn't need to be compatible with such code, you'd have been able to recommend it to non-geeks sooner.

BTW, your other statement about browser dominance is deeply, deeply wrong. Prior to IE4 Netscape had a >90% market share.

I don't think that's right. There were lots of browsers about in those days that people don't generally remember nowadays. Evolt has archived dozens. A contemporary article lists Internet Explorer as having 25% of the market during Internet Explorer 3.0 times. I don't think any browser prior to Internet Explorer attained 90% market share (not counting the early days, of course).

Wow, you really had to stretch there didn't you.

See my response to the other guy about that. I didn't mean to imply that the Stac infringement was directly linked to Apple, I was just giving it as another example of an unfair advantage over compteitors due to illegal action.

nowadays software based on-the-fly compression of volumes is hardly considered a significant feature.

I was just reading a comment yesterday about how great it is that Reiser4 will include this as a plugin.

If Microsoft hadn't conned their way into a cheap deal for Mosaic

Ah, they conned how?

At the time, browsers were applications businesses paid for. Microsoft "paid" for licensing Mosaic in part with royalties from Internet Explorer profits, neglecting to mention the salient fact that they were going to give it away for free. A cut of zero profits doesn't add up to a lot. And then they included it in Windows and charged for it too. Microsoft eventually settled for $8 million after being threatened with a contractual audit by Spyglass.

perhaps web developers would be able to use CSS, PNG, HTML, HTTP, etc without being held back by Internet Explorer's flaws

No, they'd merely be held back by a close-sourced Netscape run by AOL instead.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8CCA 1H80.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db I don't expect that to last very long. If we've hit global peak production of petroleum, expect that recession to fast become a depression.. Katrina may be a trigger factor.

This is a good time to bring up that since 2001 Bush has put more oil away in the "reserves" than ever before.

In 2004, the president authorized loans from the reserve to help refiners make up for missing supplies when Hurricane Ivan struck...After Hurricane Ivan struck the Gulf of Mexico in September 2004, the administration loaned about 5.4 million barrels of crude oil from the reserve to five companies. It was repaid by April 2005.

... especially when there's real pro-Google, anti-Microsoft, anti-Ballmer fodder to be had.

But we all know Slashdot isn't interested in that sort of tripe.

- shadowmatter

It's not easy to find raw sales numbers, but here goes:

AMD sold 36 million processors in 2004.

They are opening the new Fab 36 in 2005/06, which should roughly double AMD's production capacity (their two current 8-inch fabs produce less than the new 12-inch fab can).

Intel should have 375 million per year capacity in 2005/06, thanks to 5 new 12-inch fabs.

Apple's sales in 2004 were about 3.3 million computers.

So, you do the math: roughly 5-10% of AMD's capacity (depending on how troublesome Fab 36 is) is a pretty big drop in the bucket, especially since AMD is currently so stretched to meet their current supplier's demands that they're outsourcing chip production.

But, for Intel, who should increase capacity by a huge jump in the next year, Apple is no strain.

Of course if people routinely block traffic from certain areas of the world with a high concentration of spammers and the like, then it is going to hurt the honest people who happen to be living in the same neighbourhood as the spammers. It is called "collateral damage" by some military organisations.

It looks as if Florids is high on the list of areas to have all its Internet traffic blocked, if we want to block spammers.

Business Week Are Hurricanes Swamping Spammers? Lots of folks think the hits that the Sunshine State (aka Spam State) have taken slowed the volume. Probably isn't so, though
Spamhaus United States Heads Towards Legalization of Spam
The RegisterFlorida spammers sue anti-spam groups

Only in certain states:

  The EPA announced it would temporarily allow the sale of higher-polluting gasoline in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi because those states can't provide enough fuel to consumers that meets Clean Air Act requirements.

but on the other hand...

  The agency also temporarily eased diesel fuel sulfur restrictions and rules on gasoline evaporation nationwide.

from

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8CB0 8301.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db

You are correct about the marketshare. Howerver, I wasn't far off.

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/mac os/story/0,10801,100548,00.html

http://www.firstadopter.com/fa/archives/000754.htm l

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2003/tc20030618_7983_tc056.htm

They went down to just above 2%. Now that they are abandoning the PPC and switching over to X86 what do you think their sales will be for the next few quarters?

Thank you. Anything you say after that is just irrelevant and back-pedaling.

SpyGlass's contract explicity stated that they would get royalties for the sale of the browser. Microsoft, however, pulled a fast one by bundling it with the OS (which they made a profit off of!) then paying SpyGlass nothing! It was nothing more than a dirty loophole, and the courts agreed. (Even though SpyGlass still walked away with little.)

Spyglass fucked up the lawsuit and you like to blame Microsoft because you are a zealot. If you read the contract, you would have known that the annual cap is $5 million. For whatever reason, Spyglass settled for an one-time $7.5M and was glad that it settled. It was a boneheaded decision. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/januar y/new0122d.htm The company I work for is also in direct competition with Microsoft (and Google) but I don't blame my hitting a pot hole on my drive home on Microsoft.

Got proof?

What are ya, blinded by Google-love and Microsoft-hate that you can't do a search on Google?

"The proprietor of Froogles.com registered the Web address in December 2000, according to the filing, but did not use the domain for business until July 2002. Google claims that this was four years after it had secured rights to its Google trademarks. Froogles.com registered for a trademark for e-commerce related marketing services in September 2003.

For its part, Google filed a trademark application for Froogle in November 2002, and was granted the mark in February 2004." -News.com 4/19/05

"Humphrey said that after Wolfe filed an opposition proceeding with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office last spring, Google told Wolfe that if he would dismiss his opposition, it would leave him alone. If he refused, according to Humphrey, Google's attorneys said, "We'll file a complaint and take the trademark away from you."

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/print.php/349 8621
4/18/2005

Not only are you a zealot, you are lazy as well.

similar statistics...

• business week: google=52%
• clickz: google=59%
• zdnet: google=36.9%

BusinessWeek has the story

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug 2005/tc20050824_9823_tc119.htm

Available as a software download, the service could turn the long-divided IM market on its ear by creating the potential for interoperability not only with offerings from established players, including Time Warner's (TWX ) America Online, Microsoft's (MSFT ) MSN, and Yahoo! (YHOO ), but also with lesser-known services such as Trillian, Apple Computer's (AAPL ) iChat, and GAIM, an IM client for Linux users.

Georges Harik, Google's director of product management, says the company has opened communications with AOL and Yahoo, offering them interoperability on the Google Talk network free, and it will soon contact Microsoft. It remains to be seen whether these big players, especially AOL, which runs both its AOL Instant Messenger service and the globally popular ICQ service, will take Google up on its offer. ...

SIP SUPPORT. With the launch of its IM software, Google also plans to become an important force in the growing market for Internet-based voice calls. Harik says Google is looking seriously at adding technical support for SIP, or session initiation protocol, an industry standard used to make phone calls over the Internet. When it adds the support, its network would become compatible with such Net-telephony services as Vonage, SIPphone, and others that use SIP.

AOL E-mail Data Thief Gets 15 Months in Prison

AP's Larry Neumeister reports that the AOL employee who sold 92 million stolen e-mail addresses and screen names to spammers has been sentenced to one year and three months in prison. Jason Smathers sold the list to spammers for $28,000, who then proceeded to send as many as 7 billion spam messages. The prosecutor in the case estimated 'AOL suffered a loss of 10 cents for every 1,000 spam e-mails sent to subscribers.' The judge suggested that Smathers pay $84,000 in restitution but will decide on the final figure after AOL files details of financial losses due to increased staff, hardware and software costs. An interesting note: Judge Alvin Hellerstein said in December that he canceled his AOL subscription because he received too much spam.

2005-08-17 21:42:32 AOL E-mail Data Thief Gets 15 Months in Prison (Index,Spam) (rejected)

The article says that one of the things they need the cash for is possible acquisitions. It seems they are acquiring a lot.

One of the recent ones that I have not read about on slashdot is android

What's interesting about that one is that it's being speculated that they have been creating an Operating System for cell-phones.

(That should be enough to have another 50 stories on slashdot about people pondering what technology is going get involved with next. ;))

I remember she posted some crap that supposedly took an objective view of the Windows vs Linux TCO. She states there that the server operating systems are 'largely commoditized.' Excuse my language, but how in the h*ll is paying a grand for a Win2K3 server license a commodity? Does she know what a commodity is? Does she know that Linux is free (as in beer)? In addition, I read another article from BusinessWeek that stated that she had publised a "white paper" sponsored by Microsoft and was posted on their site.

How can this be objective and nonpartisan? Everything I have read by this person screams "Steve Ballmer paid me a couple of grand to make my Microsoft marketing look like real research in order to fool people that are still on the fence."

Thats the vibe I get anyway.

Criticism of a previous Didio study related to Linux TCO...

Laura Didio whines that slashdot does not like her...

Quote from wikipedia by Didio: "The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'". And on another occasion she followed up: "I'm all for open source, and competition serves everyone's interest. But if Linux is really to take its place alongside Windows... then the vendors in this space cannot act like a bunch of hippies in a '60s commune or ashram. There really is no such thing as a free lunch." ... does this sound professional to you?

Collection of Laura Didio quotes, compiled by Groklaw, on the subject of Didio insisting that she'd seen the linux-sco code comparison and it contained clearly copied code. This was posted, mind you, on the day that the judge ordered SCO to either provide the evidence linux contained copied sco code or drop those accusations from their lawsuit, and SCO resonded by dropping those accusations. In other words, the evidence never existed. There was never any copied code and SCO has as good as admitted so in court by their refusal to specify what the copied code was when the court ordered them to.

Laura Didio has made it clear she is not someone worth giving the slightest bit of attention or media press to. She has in the past shown a complete lack of any idea of rigor in compiling or presenting a study, as well as a willingness to both mislead and outright lie. This is not someone who knows how to do journalism, or how to do an informed study. This is someone who knows how to do one thing and one thing only, and that is shill for Microsoft when Microsoft pays them to. Right now she is shilling for Microsoft. Microsoft press releases released from Microsoft itself may occasionally contain good points or true statements, such as "Microsoft is a company located in Redmond". However, even when this is the case they don't get printed on the front page. Why should Microsoft press releases released through the front of Didio be treated any different?

An important thread to note here is that none other than Carly Fiorina is the one of the principals in spinning off Lucent and Bell Labs from AT&T. She looked like a superstar for it though in fact Lucent was mostly just a beneficiary of being a telecom/networking company during the bubble when none could fail. Their stock history is interesting from a peak around $80 in 2000 to $2.88 today. Carly's time in the sun at Lucent was from the spinoff in 1996 until she jumped to HP in 1999. Here is a glowing Businessweek article on her when she took the helm at HP then. One interesting quote:

"she helped to turbocharge product development by the long-coddled Bell Labs engineers."

A guy told me once on an airplane beware any company or person who makes the cover of Businessweek because it usually means they've peaked and are starting down. He said it in context of SGI and its a rule that worked just as well for Carly.

Hindsight being 20/20 you have to wonder if Carly didn't get lucky at Lucent thanks to the bubble and she was made to look like a superstar when in fact she was a one women wrecking ball for research and development at both Lucent/Bell Labs and HP and its labs.

Another Carly theme at Bell Labs, if you go to their web site today they are a case study in out sourcing with their greatest achievement today looking to be the fact that they have labs in China, India and Ireland.

Well, full disclosure: I work for EMC. Having said that, let me respond to your statement about "losing grip" on 90s dominance. EMC has achieved 11 straight quarters of double digit growth. Last quarter revenue grew 19%. EMC is clearly #1 by market share. In fact, there is an article here: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug 2005/tc2005084_5865_tc024.htm that well sums up the solid financial and market share position EMC is in. I don't want to debate the merits of EMC technology here--this isn't the time or place. But your statement seemed to imply a dying on the vine (or mediocre achievement at best) for EMC, which is factually not the case.

A CISSP?

A cursory google search reveals that she's been working in the secure-systems group at Oracle (albeit in a Product Marketing role) for 12 years. I'd say that's fairly substantial.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may 2003/tc20030529_1659_tc111.htm

I'd say YOU lack sufficient "credentials" to post on her lack of sufficient credentials since you obviously didn't look for any sense of her qualifications save for the two-sentence bio provided in the grandparent.

What a lamer.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar 2005/tc2005032_0932_tc119.htm

looks like im not the only one thats noticed /. is dying

What does it say when google and yahoo are creating brain drain hiring good developers that push the limits of standard-incompetent browsers, while Microsoft does not seem to be able to get qualified people to just make the thing work right in the first place? I know there are some brainy people in the ranks of Microsoft. At this point can ultimately determine it isn't a question of "can't fix" but "won't fix" ... or "afraid to fix" ? It's been hypothesized that Microsoft is afraid to fix IE for fear of losing their application monopoly to web applications.

Their whole business model, outside of printers, is to resell other companies products as their own brand.

This is not entirely true for printers either. Only the inkjet line is truly HP's own design. All of the laserjet engines are manufactured by Canon according to some design specs HP sets. The original Color Laserjet had a Konica Minolta engine, and so does the relatively new, but already ditched, digital copier line.

Although not necessarily using embryonic stem cells, a much more supportive attitude from the government has put S. Korea on the forefront of this technology. I wouldn't be surprised if Hwang Woo Suk is responsible for most of the major advances in the next few years.

Where in the world are you finding any evidence to claim that their current ideology is antiquated and obselete?

Here.

Do they keep making money the way things are going? Sure they do. But there won't be any growth, worse, Linux/*BSD continue to act like ducks pecking them to death.

So if they're lucky, their stock price stays where it is.

For Gates, everything is about growth. Making money hand over fist isn't enough. He's done that already.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar20 05/sb20050331_4850_sb040.htm

While I'm no expert on the subject, I'm afraid I'm going to have to challenge you on a fact or two....

Stern Electronics, the 80s manufacturer of arcade games (including some pinballs), is not the same thing as Stern Pinball, although Gary Stern was involved with each of them. Stern Pinball is what used to be Sega Pinball, and before that, Data East Pinball. It's a pinball division that's changed hands, and been renamed, a few times. It doesn't make sense to say that they've "survived" all this time; only recently have they become an independent company, bought off Sega by Gary Stern (who had been an employee).

Stern Pinball, in whatever form, has never known for making the best tables. When Williams (who also owned Bally) was in the market, they were king. When they left the market, dismantling their pinball division and firing several star designers including Pat Lawlor (Addams Family, Twilight Zone), that basically meant no one was making pinball games anymore.

Gary Stern saw the opportunity to get into the market. Stern seems to genuinely love pinball, and so has more than a monetary motive in buying the company. Without Williams in the market, he saw that it was possible to make a profit, if he were the only real pinball manufacturer in the world. He's in a very precarious position, however -- if someone else starts making pingames, he could go under easily. Fortunately for him, that seems unlikely.

On to point two:
The PS3 and X-Box 360 will certainly be more powerful than the current generation of machines. But there is an amazing amount of hype flying around concerning them right now. In light of the promises made concerning the PS2 and X-Box back at their release, I'm taking whatever either company says with a three-ton grain of salt until the systems are actually released and the play of their games can be assessed.

Point three:
I'm not certain that neither Sony or Microsoft's game division will not make a profit. I'd put more money on Sony than Microsoft. Nintendo is not in as much trouble as the article seems to suggest -- reading the original article sources makes it clear what happened is that Nintendo had a large R&D charge this year, probably from development work on the Revolution.

Actually. You may be a bit paranoid. Clinton has actively pursued attention on this matter. Her office fax blasted statements to regional newsrooms (including one that I work near, which is why I have a copy of the fax) statements with handy dandy nuggets of quotes bold faced and underlined.

The bottom line is, that Clinton actively made a request of the FTC to investigate Take Two.

The vote 355-21 came AFTER Clinton had asked the FTC to investigate.

Sorry, but the Hillary is a victim of an agenda routine falls flat this time. She singled herself out on this one.

What do you mean, "the VP in question never lived in California"? According to Business Week:

Lee signed his noncompete agreement in Washington, where he worked for Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Lee worked at two Silicon Valley companies, Silicon Graphics Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.

We had a printout posted in side isles and so on that took the corporate logo and placed "integrate" under it. An apt description. I knew months ago that Hurd was talking about cutting a lot of "unnecessary" research. In imaging and printing, we were pretty insulated from most of the turmoil during and after the Compaq merger. However, even we were ultimately not immune as consumable revenue decreased, the core laser business matured, and "underperforming" businesses (that is, something not #1 or #2 in its market) sucked money from growth areas. Another problem was some management with no long-term vision: "Yes! let's invest here. . . no, wait! That costs more money than we thought!" Planning and commitment were lacking before the so-called transformation, and maybe still are. So, how are you supposed to get to even #2? That and the incredibly stupid idea of combining printing and PCs. Vyomesh Joshi is actually a good leader who shoots strait and doesn't dance around hard questions; the imaging and printing organization as a separate company would do quite well. At least Carly was booted. Hurd is doing what he has to, and it's not easy (not that it makes it any nicer for those that are getting the axe). I think there will be plenty of post layoff survivor syndrome there for a while.

I'm sorry, I sound bitter. I'm not though, HP was fairly sensitive and generous to those of us that chose to leave on our own accord. I'm glad I did. There's just sadly nothing about HP anymore that makes it better to work for than anywhere else, and there once was. It has become, even at the printing level, an integrator of other technologies rather than a source. Thus the dissolution of this and other research groups will continue. Hurd wants to bring R&D "closer to the customer." I also doubt that severance packages will ever be that generous again. I found a good job in a completely different industry, and I wish HP the best of luck. Wow, that was therapeutic.

By the way, if you have not read it, check out the article that pissed off VJ. I don't know how they did it, but Business Week nailed it almost 100%.

I think you guys are missing the point here.

Business Want
CS students that code and can perform IT functions at a minimum cost in salary and no additional training
Is this not the reason they have moved US jobs oversees? "They can't get it cheep enough --- go over sees"

Education want
Students to teach what ever the hell they think business wants at a minimum cost to develop new teaching material?
Is this not the reason that raw and applied R&D funding is disappearing in the US? (RE Microsoft, IBM, SUN, etc)

US CS Students want
Get a good job which is high paying enough to pay off the education debts and have money for toys

US Competitiveness
US federal funding has been reduced to raw research and development (Where did Bell Labs go?)
Businesses have also reduced all raw research and development (Where did Bell Labs go?)
Is this not why Education is no longer doing research and development? creating new material faster then they can print books?
Is this not why business now outsource to country which do have perform research?
Is this not why US CS Students are (and other IT professionals) not working outside their area of training or unemployed?

Stock Market want
Better profits faster from Business! No long term view, or focused on US competitiveness!
Is this not why negative public comments towards business which put more money into R&D?
The were also telling us in the 90's that the service economy has benefits, they forget to tell us about the outsourcing!

Business Executives want
Focused on their personal bottom line
Is this not why "CEOs of these businesses have climbed to three-times annual salary from just one-times yearly pay in the past year alone" (http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/apr20 01/ca20010419_812.htm)
CEOs these days routinely make 300 to 500 times more than their average employees and sometimes much more.
(http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/LegislateAg ainstGreed.html)

Microsoft has done this before, and gotten dozens of people to quit their jobs temporarily, or switch the area they work in for a particular employer. The Crossgain episode (where the ex-msft founders and many of their fellow ex-msft recruits were forced to resign from their own company - see this BusinessWeek article for more: http://www.businessweek.com/2001/01_06/b3718158.ht m/) a few years ago left a deep impression on the programmers here in the Redmond area. Non-compete clauses are no-win for the worker-bees here in Washington state. I don't know about China, though.

MySpace apparently has a strong community for Indie music bands, and has a 'stickiness' quotient far higher than that of Friendster or other social networking sites. BW Link

Let's just agree he should have said "releasing" instead of "creating".

David J Farber suggests "instrumental in the development of" would be more accurate.

Given the hostile and partisan way Gore's words have been misinterpreted, I doubt if Gore's critics are interested in his actual contribution to the creation of the Internet, however he might have phrased it.

The award mentioned in the post that started this thread speaks for itself.

I wonder about that "walk-out" though. These "Core Developers" are all part of the JBoss Community still, right?

Also, there hasn't been any news from the Core Developers since 2003, when they walked out.

Meanwhile, Marc Fleury and JBoss appears to be doing well.

1) Astroturf wildly to market your product, on the assumption that your customers and fellow developers are idiots
2) Issue a mealymouthed pseudo-apology, when you get caught
3) Wait a year, then publicly call your fellow OSS developers "hippies" and "Hari Krishnas"
4) ??
5) Profit!!!

Mabye, just maybe, the don't recognize OSS as a viable business alternative becuase it isn't a viable business alternative.

OSS makes a lot of sense if you are a company selling consulting services. They want you to spend your money on consultants, not software. Ideally, there wouldn't be any software. You would just hire these guys to write custom software for you at enormous cost. Like hiring stonemasons to carve your house out of local limestone.

But for everyone who won't buy that expertise, there is a lot to be said for something that you buy or license that just works out of the box. Fire the stone masons and buy bricks instead. The brick factory churns these things out by the millions, so they are cheap. (Of course the analogy doesn't fit exactly because the second copy of a software program costs close to nothing.)

For a publisher, one can spend a bunch of dough bulding the software, then press a hundred million copies and divide those costs among all the boxes. So you and I can plunk down $179 and get something like five million lines of code representing some insane number of man hours. This is a pretty compelling business model.

None of this says that a all of MS's software fulfils all the promises it makes, but then again, has anyone seen a consultant meet all his promises?

I would question the wisdom of trusting IBM, ORACLE, and Sun, over MSFT.
While by no means infallible, those graphs tend to favor MSFT over the others.

Of course IBM wants OSS, they sell the consulting services. Of course Oracle wants OSS (except postgres), becuase what you don't spend on a UNIX license you can spend on an Oracle license. Sun likes OSS because...well they *are* the platform company that championed a platform agnostic programming language. I wouldn't put much stock in their advice.