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Apples stock slipped almost 10% yesterday after news that iPod sales were not as strong as people expected they would be. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D89FF 2B80.htm?campaign_id=apn_tech_down

They launch rockets from Tanegashima Island, Japan's answer to Cape Canaveral...

Didn't IBM push Blue Gene to 180'something teraflops recently?? News story herer

• Apple's extended experience with High Traffic in Video Downloads from their Quicktime Trailer Site(I would love to see us Slashdot them, everyone watch "The Cars" trailer at 12 am CST today)
  
• Steve Job's dedication that "this year will be the year of HD"...why is that Stevey? if I still don't have my HD *Television*?
  
• Sony's distaste for Microsoft
  
• and more ...
  

I'm pretty sure this has to do with Microsoft's long history dealing with Japanese customers (since the late '70s), MS's large revenues from Japan (over 10%), and (maybe) the relatively low piracy rates in Japan compared to other non-English speaking countries.

With the help of Kay Nishi, Microsoft established its first international sales office in Japan in late 1978. This was before DOS when MS was primarily a language company and early Japanese PCs needed languages.

Even if we disregard MS's "head start" in Japan, Japan probably has been the largest non-English speaking market. Despite Japan's relatively low population, Japan has a highly developed economy, relatively low piracy rates, and a long history with computers (NEC). At the end of 2002 (one year after Windows XP), MS got 20% of its revenue from the Asia-Pacific region, but half of it was from Japan alone.

I'm sure MS is working damn hard on the Portuguese versions of their software.

So, they intend to use these in large scale applications. I wonder how that would work out on a train that has to climb a long grade, then decend for miles. On the decent, the batteries charge up quickly, then the power is available for the next upgrade.

I can see where they would want to show these batteries off in cars and trains before bringing them to our favorite Toshiba Laptop.

Concerning laptop power, don't we have fuel cells being tested in laptops that would do better than these batteries?
Those are supposed to last all day.

Frankly, these lawsuits are becoming stupidly commonplace. Which is fine, soon companies will warn of every possible danger and predict their own total failure over and over again, just to set the bar low enough that they're guaranteed to cross over.

Obviously, there are companies which really hide incredibly significant facts, but EA only lowered its estimates by about 10% for the year. And it takes a much smaller change in gross revenues to effect that profit change, since their marginal production cost is fairly low. And, truth be told, they're only being sued over estimates! They switched from one forward-looking estimate to another forward-looking estimate. They haven't even produced an actual earnings number, since the fiscal year in question hasn't even ended yet.

When it comes down to it, a lot of class action securities lawsuits just amount to extortion... and the law firm in question isn't even the one which filed the case; they're just involved in the class recruitment/lead plaintiff recruitment feeding frenzy:

[...] To view a copy of the Complaint initiating the class action, which was not filed by Schatz & Nobel [...]

I'm surprised no one has filed a frivolous lawsuit against Slashdot for its incredible lax editorial process ;)

If people got really sick of it and just came to /. less, maybe management would wake up and can these guys posting the stories.

It's already happening: Less Impact from the "Slashdot Effect".

As "chief software architect", Bill Gates is responsible for killing a lot of in-house client side development. And don't make the claim that .NET is going to improve that situation, because Microsoft is going to introduce yet another major paradigm shift with Avalon.

Read Vendor Dependent Death Marches VS Open Kaizen

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan 2005/tc20050119_5359.htm Its an editorial piece in which the author basicly states that the PC has hit its peak.

yes, but what about the fact that slashdot effect is getting weaker?

Nissan is talking out of the side of their ass btw because while they say that, they're putting out a hybrid Altima within 2 years (using Toyota tech). Go figure! And by 2005, there will be 10 types of hybrids available on the market; even Subaru.

Also, I doubt the small profit margin because Toyota has been doing this for 7 YEARS. That isn't a loss-leader type of longevity.

And let's spin the numbers, although Toyota hybrids + other hybrids represent 5% of total sales, 100% of Toyota's maximum ~100K hybrid production is being sold before it hits the production line with months-long waiting list. Sales are growing at double-rate.

Project that out for yourself and compare to the shrinking and stagnant SUV sales.

If Toyota could make enough hybrids, it would be the LARGEST and fastest growing percentage of total vehicles sold.

For me, quality of the news matter. I need more than just facts. An article in BW (online link at The Future Of The New York Times ) two months ago discussed this same topic. That article included a different angle in that the NYT continues to do investigative work whereas a lot of other papers have chosen to cut back.

The ISPs have 14 days to comply. And once located will be offered the opporunity to settle out of court.

Apart from the obvious spelling mistake, it simply doesn't say what it means to say. The ISPs will be offered the opportunity to settle out of court, once they have been located? Really? Are you sure?

Maybe this is the reason why Slashdot is sending far less visitors to websites these days. Because people are getting fed up at reading crap. Slashdot points to some fairly interesting stories, but it's frustrating to read it when it looks like a ten year-old wrote it.

Handling its own design work is one reason for best-sellers like the iPod and Shuffle. Steve Jobs is the other.

"Designed by Apple in Cupertino."

The words are printed in such small type on the back of Apple's (AAPL ) tiny new iPod Shuffle MP3 player that you have to squint to read them.

But maybe Business Week is just a bunch of Apple fanboys....with presbyopia.

Now, to be fair, this is not a case of the counterfeiter slapping an Apple brand on the product and selling it as an iShuffle, but it's close. Who knows, maybe the same factory is also selling Apples, we just can't tell because they all look like iPods.

Now, to be fair, this is not a case of the counterfeiter slapping an Apple brand on the product and selling it as an iShuffle, but it's close. Who knows, maybe the same factory is also selling Apples, we just can't tell because they all look like iPods.

It could be just coincidence, but Burst.com is also a company held by Baystar Capital. These are the people responsible for $50 million in funding for the SCO legal case against IBM over Linux. But then you would have to believe that when Microsoft helped Baystar and SCO meet was a coincidence. And don't forget when Microsoft bought $12 million in SCO licenses when they didn't need them.

And who can forget when Sun bought SCO licenses too and then less than a year later, Microsoft and Sun were best friends and settled their lawsuits with each other.

Maybe some of this stuff is a coincidence and then again maybe none of it is. I find it hard to believe that all of it is a coincidence though.

a federal court denied motions by the nation's second-largest satellite television provider to dismiss patent infringement claims by digital video recording company TiVo Inc. [...]

TiVo has alleged that EchoStar and certain units are violating a key TiVo patent issued in May 2001, known as the "time warp" patent.

Look where SCOXE is today. Nobody is trading the stock. Volume is down 90% since the NASDAQ listed them as out of compliance with SEC regs. They may be kicked down to the Pink Sheets next week, but they're already trading like a Pink Sheet stock.

Everybody laughs at SCO now. Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes are all very negative on SCO.

Darl was interviewed by Business Week a few days ago. Some great momments:

• Q: Ralph Yarro was terminated in December as CEO of Canopy Group, SCO's longtime financial backer, for allegedly overpaying himself. Is Ralph Yarro still on SCO's board?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Do you want him to stay on the board?

  A: Ralph has been a great board member. He's been very supportive and valuable in terms of the input he has provided.

  Q: What has he helped you do?

  A: Ralph has a great entrepreneurial mind. He's been good on intellectual property and legal battles. I wouldn't call him the architect of our legal strategy, but he clearly has added value. How that's all going to play out, I don't know.

  Q: Are you concerned about his ability to serve?

  A: We had a board meeting last week. The company needs to get some clarity about the situation. It's important to figure out who represents the Canopy shares. As long as the cloud is there regarding the Canopy situation we want to remove the cloud.

  Q: Will he stay on the board?

  A: No one on the SCO board has asked him to step down. He will continue to serve.

Canopy owns part of SCO. Yarrow used to represent Canopy on the SCO board, but he doesn't, any more. Canopy fired Yarrow. Yarrow and Canopy are sueing each other. This is clearly a dysfunctional organization, not a serious threat. They've been referred to in the press as "the gang that couldn't sue straight".

http://www.alcatel.com/ http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_02 /b3865705.htm *ahem* I don't think this really needs discussing any further. People have interests, these interests are financial - people will say things to support these financial interests. Obviously the CEO of a NETWORK company would like to convince people that physical storage of data is a thing of the past.

Sorry, but how the hell are the people who come up with the numbers able to differentiate between legal and illegal torrents?

They aren't able to do that. In fact, they said no such thing. It's just yet another instance of the Slashdot "editors" blindly publishing something without even bothering to follow and read the links (in this case to their own site!).

In other news, the Slashdot effect is rapidly waning. But of course, there's no connection to the rapidly declining quality of Slashdot, is there?

There is a world of difference between Top 5 programs and run of the mill MBA's. If you get your MBA from one of Harvard, MIT's Sloan School, Stanford, Wharton or Kellogg, then go for it.

See: http://geocities.com/topmbaprograms/
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/

It is that there is an alternative cryptographic method out there, that should quantum computers be invented tomorrow, we would still have an effective method of cryptography.

Perhaps this is a reference to proposed methods of quantum cryptography, which don't depend on "one-way functions" such as is standard in public-key systems. Even though quantum computing would render ineffective any cryptosystem that could be broken in finite time, the same technology could be used to create secure systems (as long as Alice and Bob had a dedicated line of fiber between them). In fact, rudimentary versions of these systems have been tested in recent years: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul 2003/tc20030715_5818_tc047.htm

Here is an article that someone linked to the other day.

They should be, people are getting sick of them.

I might be wrong about this, but I think CP/M was a proprietary spec protected by copyrights while UNIX is an "open standard" spec currently defined by the Open Group.

In fact, DRI did consider legal action against Microsoft and IBM. Instead, DRI and IBM agreed to offer customers a choice of either DOS or CP/M when buying the original IBM PC (no OS was pre-installed). However, DRI was surprised when IBM charged $240 for CP/M and $40 for DOS. Guess which OS the customers chose.

From the BusinessWeek article "The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates":

But his problem was that software copyright had just become law three years earlier, and it wasn't clear what constituted infringement. Davis, the DRI lawyer, believes that based on the number of similarities DRI's forensic consultants found between the original DOS and CP/M, "in today's world, you could take it to court and get an infringement." But not in 1981. So rather than sue, Kildall agreed to license CP/M to Big Blue. He was floored when the PC was released and IBM charged $240 per copy for CP/M and just $40 for DOS. Kildall's conclusion, according to his memoir: "I believe the entire scenario was contrived by IBM to garner the existing standard at almost no cost."

Let's review some interesting facts:

1) Patterson sold his QDOS to Gates for $50,000, whereas Kildall sold his company to Novell in 1991 for $120 million, according the Oct/2004 BusinessWeek article (link:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content /04_43/b3905109_mz063.htm).

2) In his defamation suit, Patterson is asking for $75,000, plus court costs, per the Register piece (link:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/03/msdo s_paternity_dispute/).

3) The Register article includes a photo of Patterson's 86-DOS (QDOS) manual with the word, "Programmer", misspelled on the manual's cover.

There is a movie somewhere in there, but it's definitely not about ambition.

American coverage of a similar technology.

BAH! You didn't try very hard. Here is a link to a more realistic technology that is in many ways similar to the one in the Slashdot article. That is, they're also reporting solar cells using nano-particles that can be applied like a paint. Their claims also seem closer to reality.

If only there were a way to also convert infrared light into energy...WAIT! They're already working on that too! Check out this Business Week article. The technology in the Business Week article seems very similar to the Indian article. Although the Toronto folks are using organic components which will hurt their solar cells longevity. But their claims aren't quite as wild in terms of time-to-market (10 years)...

Handwringing about the quality of American education usually preceeds whining about shortages of workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the quality of the schools will be less important anyway because most of the jobs likely to be created in the next decade don't require a bachelor degree. This Businessweek artticle summarizes that point.

I know many underemployed people today. Some were underemployed during good times. And now the BLS says this is likely to not only continue but worsen. So why is there a hue and cry about bad schools? Why are industry leaders like Gates involved? They are setting the table for subsequent lobbying campaigns to raise the quotas of H1-B and L1 visas. This isn't the first time they've followed this script and it won't be the last.

In all, I fear martian microbial infection about as much as I fear the uprising of the penguins. Dude. That's already in progress.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_32 /c3744124.htm

Quoting this article:
A frog on a riverbank is approached by a scorpion that is trying to find a way across the river: Says the scorpion: "Dear frog, would you be so kind as to carry me across on your back?" The frog replies: "I will not, as I fear that you will sting me and then I will die." The scorpion says: "Dear frog, reason with me. Were I to sting you while you are carrying me, you would die, and I would drown. Why would I do such a thing?"

The frog considers this, and consents to carry the scorpion. As the frog struggles against the current with the scorpion on his back, he suddenly feels the piercing sting of the scorpion's tail. The dying frog asks: "Scorpion, why did you do that? Now we both shall die!" The scorpion shrugs: "It's in my nature."

...and the funny part is, that this article was referring to Microsoft. I thought of this fable, and I see the connection is hardly a stretch of the imagination.

Quoting an old fable:

A frog on a riverbank is approached by a scorpion that is trying to find a way across the river: Says the scorpion: "Dear frog, would you be so kind as to carry me across on your back?" The frog replies: "I will not, as I fear that you will sting me and then I will die." The scorpion says: "Dear frog, reason with me. Were I to sting you while you are carrying me, you would die, and I would drown. Why would I do such a thing?"

The frog considers this, and consents to carry the scorpion. As the frog struggles against the current with the scorpion on his back, he suddenly feels the piercing sting of the scorpion's tail. The dying frog asks: "Scorpion, why did you do that? Now we both shall die!" The scorpion shrugs: "It's in my nature."

The funny thing, I found this via google, and it came from another microsoft related article...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_32 /c3744124.htm

Once you strip away the official MS hype, Bill Gates is anything but self-made. Yes, he's a very shrewd businessman who understands software, but he got two helpful head-starts:

1. His parents were millionaires. He wasn't some ordinary middle-class geek kid. His parents were able to send him to private school and buy him computer hardware that (back then) cost thousands of dollars.

2. Microsoft got the DOS contract through nepotism. Bill's mother was a friend of IBM's CEO, on many of the same charity and corporate boards. That's why IBM bought the OS from Microsoft, not the company that actually developed it.

Qwest - a company that already has more than $14B of debt, yet zero free cash flow, a financial loss, decreasing revenue, negative book value, and negative return on assets, is not as stable of a partner as Verizon ($9B of free cash flow and net income of $7B last year, even though it carries more debt).

A lot of small businesses used WIndows 98 and didn't upgrade to either 2000 or XP.

Windows 2K was mostly for corporate use - home users didn't need it over Windows 98 (well, they did, but they didn't know it).

XP was supposed to be direct corporate upgrade from 2000 (with some eye candy for the home users in "Home" edition - which is irrelevant to my point.) But XP simply wasn't significantly better for CORPORATE use than 2000. That's why it took a long time to get corporations weaned off it. That's why MS came up with their license that guaranteed a new version every three years or so (and then screwed up with Longhorn which is pissing off a lot of corporations who paid for that license).

XP was released around October 2001. Your stats page shows it had only 30% in March 2004, two and a half years later. I'd say that was a lot slower upgrades than Microsoft wanted.

Even now, the latest stats show 2000 and 98 still have nearly 30% of the Microsoft installed base.

Try this interesting article for a perspective.

RMS doesn't want to make any concessions. The Open Source community does, and gets taken seriously.

Taken seriously by who, Business Week? Check out this cover story that praises Linus, but then goes on to do a hatchet job on RMS. Both Linus and RMS shared the EFF's inaugral Pioneer Award. Beware of those who play one up and put down another.

Its easy to see what the agenda is here. As FOSS gains mainstream acceptance, the corporate world signals to its members who the trouble-makers are. The ones who managers should avoid.

People say RMS is a great coder and spokesmen too, but his real legacy is the GPL. It will go down with Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence as one of the great documents of history. Its already spawned the creative commons, copyleft movement that is transforming our culture.

His legacy for the future is huge.

You can see the top 10 list for 2004 here.

1. Coke
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Intel

This popularity contest at brandchannel.com really seems to be ranking cult brands.

• Knife the baby
• Kneecap
• Air supply

Divide those two numbers and you see that on average each song has an estimated value of $377,292 for the year. The potential fine for a single copyright infringement is $150,000, or nearly 40% of the average total annual value of a song. For a single infringement.

Yes the more valuable songs are infringed more often. But if you're going to base the maximum potential fine on every song that's on the CD, even the crappy ones, you need to work with the average value. This fine needs to be lowered drastically to put it more in line with reality. Maybe make an exception for more successful songs, but $150,000 per song is ridiculously high.

MCI is hurting and Sprint clearly wants to focus on wireless.

A recent Slashdot thread mentioned Linus's citationin as a top manager in 2004. His right blend of management discipline and independence has kept the Linux project successfully evolving for 13 years. And still be a Geek and make some money.
Plus Linus is on the cover again this week.

A recent Slashdot thread mentioned Linus's citationin as a top manager in 2004. His right blend of management discipline and independence has kept the Linux project successfully evolving for 13 years. And still be a Geek and make some money.
Plus Linus is on the cover again this week.

Now be a doubleplus-good slashdotter,
There was never a dup, anyone who thinks there was one has commited a though crime.

Linus was never seen on the cover of Business Week.

If this is true, than perhaps technology such as SnoCap could be used

From the page you linked:

When the user finds a file on another user's computer within that network, the newly downloaded software will check with Snocap's database to see if that file is registered. If it's not, it's up to the service to decide whether to send the file. But Snocap can notify the labels about which unauthorized files are being requested, so they can be registered.

From the SNOCAP FAQ:

SNOCAP provides a batch registration service for labels with large catalogs to easily upload tracks and album information. Smaller labels and independent artists will be able to use the SNOCAP self-registration tool to input their works into the database.

In this proposal, what's to prevent a pirate from defrauding SNOCAP into thinking that he represents a label who owns copyright in a given work?

This may not be worth much more than the pixels it's printed on, but a Business Week poll that asks what browser you'll be using in six months currently has Firefox at 48% against "Explorer" at 32%. "Mozilla" is listed separately at 10% so if you take Mozilla and Firefox together that's a nice lead. Opera is sitting at 3.5%.

Remember when there was a "browser market"?

Make sure to cast your vote!

Not the last few decades. People are getting increasingly worried that girls are pulling further and further ahead of boys in school, and are starting to believe that the teaching methods used are ill-suited to boys' needs. See, for example, this story.

Oops, here's the link