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I suppose there's a different privacy issue w/ regard to phone manufactures and software developers (and potential hackers) tracking your rough whereabouts, but, technically, isn't locally stored location information redundant? Telcom's have long cooperated with law enforcement in tracking and spying on their customers, and, my understanding anyway, is that provisions of the Patriot Act allow for warrantless taps, searches, etc.

So, what is the difference? Why the outcry and concern? Heck, there's even a case of the FBI activating users' microphones remotely to bug their conversations. Seems scarier to me. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

    I can only think about the massive lawsuit Mr. Allen attempted last year was
    to be a further fund arm for projects like this.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20025438-37.html

    Ok, Google, you have Google Sky, you got out of a stupid lawsuit, here's
    a tax writ ..... good project!

Apple IOS devices are being outsold better than two to one by android. They see the market they created slipping from their grasp. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051610-17.html

Interesting claim - you realise you are quoting predictions? Even odder, the article completely fails to actually say what the current iPhone (let alone iOS) market share is.

If by "paying the price", you mean being the worlds largest mobile manufacturer by both revenue:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20056289-248.html

And having 50% of the total worldwide profit of cell phones.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/31/apple-is-still-sucking-most-of-the-profit-out-of-the-mobile-phone-business/

Largest revenue because they sell an overpriced piece of hardware. Most profits because they do not do R&D and sell WAY over the cost of hardware

The problem is: you can build your own proprietary OS from BSD roots and invest a lot of money, or you can get a GPL license derivative (Android) and go with that at a much cheaper cost. Apple's now paying the price for making their deriviations of the Darwin tree more proprietary.

If by "paying the price", you mean being the worlds largest mobile manufacturer by both revenue:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20056289-248.html

And having 50% of the total worldwide profit of cell phones.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/31/apple-is-still-sucking-most-of-the-profit-out-of-the-mobile-phone-business/

Step 2) Sell products

Apple is moving HUGE amounts of iPhones and iPads.

If they were, they wouldn't be getting this desperate.

Apple IOS devices are being outsold better than two to one by android. They see the market they created slipping from their grasp.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051610-17.html

It would be a fail to think they would store anything needed on such servers, other than os. The servers are probably linked to a harddrive farm by network or fiber-channel.

Wrong. Google stores its data all over the place, including on each individual server. They designed their own networked filesystem for the purpose. If they really didn't store data locally, they'd almost certainly PXE boot and avoid drives on each server altogether. I suspect the video just used some dated footage (from a training or other internal video perhaps?), as this article clearly shows SATA drives. Every server has two drives, and since no one node is critical for anything they also wouldn't bother with RAID1 for an OS boot drive as you suggest.

No warrant needed. Justice Dept. defends warrantless cell phone tracking

A trivial google search suggests (and the first two links are to *ANDROID* community sites, so please no whining about this being "apple press releases") that:

-- Xoom has sold ~100,000 units: http://phandroid.com/2011/04/06/more-insight-on-xoom-sales-100000-since-feb-24th/

-- Samsung have claimed, then backtracked, then clarified, then re-clarified that they've sold 2 million Galaxy tablets. Of course, that's sales to the retailers & carriers, not sales to customers: http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-backtracks-on-galaxy-tab-sales-figures-shipments-not-sales-20110131/

-- Samsung went on to say that they need to "seriously rethink" their tablet strategy & pricing in the face of the iPad 2, which certainly suggests that sales are far lower than anything they would have liked to see: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20040072-1.html

The simple fact is, if either of these devices were legitimately selling as well as the iPad, we'd hear it trumpeted from every rooftop. Samsung & Motorola would NOT be bashful about saying, "We're selling as many as Apple! Our device is great and you should buy it!" Or did you think that Motorola and Samsung were trying to keep their fabulously successful tablets a secret, because they want people to give their money to Apple?

It wouldn't surprise me if TPTB squash Bedrock like a bug.

That WOULD surprise me. What would sound normal to me is if Microsoft already has a solution "conveniently" waiting in the wings to offer Wall Street and claimed it would help create jobs and heal the economy

Not much risk of anybody falling for that. Microsoft has been persona non grata in the trading industry ever since their infamous 7 hour outage on the LSE on one of the busiest trading days of the year.

Incidentally, LSE replaced the Microsoft system shortly after with a Linux based system, which had some teething problems but isn't going away any time soon because it is an order of magnitude faster than Microsoft's system.

I also would love to see stats on whether "droid-boys" don't buy. I know I've bought several apps.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html

Apple's app store revenue 2010 - $1.782 billion
Google's App Market Revenue - $102 million

All of you are so in love with app developers but they don't care who is winning.

Yeah, they stick with the one who already won. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html Apple remains king of app-store market

Yet after they had been doing that, Gamestop posted over a billion in profits from used games. The penalties don't stop people like me because, well, no free DLC or a $10 online pass?

If I play a game, I go for the cheapest option, and even take the risk of eBay (since I can get a game for half retail.) Sometimes those penalties are not much at all for the amount I saved. So companies will have to get tougher to kill second hand sales.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20055622-17.html

Cell phones locations are tracked even when they're not at use; the carriers that are keeping that record. And they don't even need a warrant to get get those records.

And if you ever get arrested or even stopped for speeding(http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20055431-1.html) they have access to everywhere you've ever been.

Make sure you remove the battery, too. Oh, wait. Nevermind.

I'm trying to recall ... didn't they strip out a bunch of functionality due to ownership issues?

I think it was mostly look and feel items, and dead unused code.

OOo had actually not gained much (some say it lost quite a bit) from the days when it was StarOffice. Significant portions of the large document (read: book sized) management capabilities, (pagination, cross-references, document linking and embedding, table and illustration management, etc), actually deteriorated significantly once Sun and Oracle took over.

I think amanfrommars made his way here.

http://www.cnet.com/profile/amanfromMars/

He can be spotted from time to time on the Reg

http://forums.channelregister.co.uk/user/5578/

--
BMO

Have you ever seen what happens when some megacorporation like, say, Google, copies something from some other megacorporation like, say, Oracle?

This. The litigation of which will probably outlive the comma and result in legal fees larger than the federal debt.

So, no, you can't make the blanket statement that corporations can just steal what they want because they have lawyers and money. Corporations have whole departments to prevent their employees from even inadvertently violating intellectual property rights of other corporations.

And good luck getting anything you wrote into a Hollywood studio. It's an entire industry that doesn't even allow you to share ideas except in a structured environment, to avoid having to defend itself against lawsuits from unimaginative dolts who come up with the same ideas everyone does (and Hollywood ends up filming because it's realized the audience is incapable of spending money on original ideas, but really, they're only doing that because of market research, so it's the same dopes who send in their unoriginal ideas who are demanding and paying to see movies with those unoriginal ideas; it's all perfectly logical, and artless).

The only problem is, Kno isn't making tablets anymore.

I thought one of the biggest Windows / SQL Server computers in the world was the Nasdaq Tandem (now HP) MIPS computer.
http://news.cnet.com/Nasdaq-upgrades-HP-based-trading-system/2110-1010_3-5628950.html
though it seems Microsoft phased it out for other customers:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/oct96/mipspr.mspx

isn't there a rumor flying around about free kindles for prime members?
here is an example: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20040764-1.html

More importantly, fight with your votes. Vote for politicians who promise to end warrantless searches and wiretapping. Oh wait...

The CNET article that has much more detail: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20051228-264.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Crave&dlvrit=140907

Only if the Republican party gains more power in the next election. They currently hold a third of the cards, not the whole deck. I agree it's a bad sign but expected. The republican party has always looked out for business interests and this is no exception.

I'm just surprised that they got 10 Democrats to vote with them. That's just as troubling.

Also, wasn't the FCC key in getting the special treatment these broadband companies now enjoy?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20004392-266.html?tag=mncol;txt

Well the HOPE is that they're committing political suicide when it comes to anyone who isn't a blind super-conservative.

I mean ffs, they just proposed a budget that cuts taxes for the rich EVEN MORE.... and they're paying for it with MEDICARE.

Do they even WANT their traditional demographics (old people for one) to vote for them in 2012?

Only if the Republican party gains more power in the next election. They currently hold a third of the cards, not the whole deck. I agree it's a bad sign but expected. The republican party has always looked out for business interests and this is no exception.

I'm just surprised that they got 10 Democrats to vote with them. That's just as troubling.

Also, wasn't the FCC key in getting the special treatment these broadband companies now enjoy?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20004392-266.html?tag=mncol;txt

When's the last time Amazon offered you 13 games for just over half the price of a brand new game? When's the last time Amazon gave away a highly rated and reviewed game for free? When's the last time Amazon offered such amazing sales like this?

Don't get me wrong, I love Amazon, but Steam just loves to trade amazing deals for a little bit of patience.

I know. Like when they never sued Motorola or Barnes & Noble.

> Firefox has better performance than Chrome? No,
> absolutely not.

Really? Firefox 4 is faster than Chrome 10 on various JavaScript tests, on various DOM tests, on a number of layout performance tests. For example, see http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20047314-12.html where Firefox comes out ahead on everything except the V8 JS test.

There are other tests it's slower on, of course (V8 JS included).

And as I said both are changing rapidly; the situation looks different if you compare Chrome 11 betas to Firefox 4, and will look different yet again when you compare Firefox 5 or Firefox 6 to the contemporaneous Chrome 14 or so.

> Fact is, memory is cheap these days.

Except on mobile devices, of course. And for 32-bit processes, which can't make use of more RAM even if they wanted to.

I think it might be better to consider that The Apple app market saw over 17x the sales of the Android Market last year.....
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html

If the only difference between Android 3.0 (which admittedly, I have not tried - just seen some videos such as http://ces.cnet.com/8301-32254_1-20027466-283.html) and 2.3 is the About Screen, then I wouldn't care (nor would I understand why there are two versions). But it looks like there is a fair amount of difference to me (perhaps not in Google Maps, but many of the other programs). I don't know how much is the apps and how much is the underlying OS, but it doesn't really matter - most people, including me, think of an Android release as the whole package.

I'm arguing against this difference - I think it would have been better to make Honeycomb as simply the next version of Android which included more features that allowed it to be configured to work better on tablets, but would still work just as fine for small screen phones and any size in between. So I hope they merge the two on the next iteration (whatever the number is).

Wow. [citation needed] much? Let's go down the list, shall we?

1) Not only can I find no evidence of a $500M figure ever having existed before your comment, but if they had made a settlement for a half billion dollars, Sony wouldn't exist today. Their operating income last year was just $342M (source). Fat chance that Sony could survive a $500M settlement hit. By all indications (i.e. because it's not mentioned in their annual filings from that year and there are no followup stories to be found), this did not impact their bottom line in any sort of meaningful way.

2) As for what the settlement actually was, they paid up to $150-175 per customer that damaged their PC in an attempt to remove the rootkit (see here), plus $5.75M in settlements to various states (source). That's it. It probably cost them less than $10M to settle the whole thing.

3) For a quick example of a company that can take a hit like the one you talked about, we all remember the Microsoft EU antitrust case from a few years back, right? The one regarding media players, where they were fined roughly $600M, and had followup fines of roughly $250M and $1.44B, all of which were extensively covered in the news since they were, at the time, the largest fines ever handed down by the EU (more info). But Microsoft was able to absorb the hit. Of course, they could do that since their operating income last year was about $24B (source), which is roughly 70x that of Sony's.

4) As for your DOJ claims, I can't find anything about government computers being infected (though I wouldn't doubt it) or the DOJ being involved at all. In fact, they never got involved, despite the public outcry and requests that a criminal investigation be launched.

Aside from government computers getting infected, is anything you said true, or are you just routinely off by a few orders of magnitude when quoting figures, as well as prone to making up stories that have little basis in fact?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20048831-245.html

Well, I know you're not new here ... but, really? I think Sony would sue people into oblivion for something like this at the drop of a hat.

O RLY? I know that Sony-hating is popular here these days, but take the 30 seconds to do a little research, instead of spouting some BS that's going to be picked up and spread around endlessly by the freetards.

Now, if you go distributing stuff on the internet that compromises their, oh, I don't know, security, chances are Sony's going to be kind of pissed over it. Or to put it another way (so eloquently by Rothbart at Sarcastic Gamer):
"Right... but if you walk up and call Mike Tyson a pussy and kick him in the nuts, who is exactly "responsible" for your ass getting kicked?"

But at that point, what has using a Mac really gained you? I guess some people just love the hardware that much?

You mean like this guy?

Ahhh so quick to blame the private enterprises. Maybe you don't actually pay attention but the nuclear industry is the most heavily regulated industry in existence.

"In one case at the Peach Bottom nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, workers at the plant were required to periodically test the control rods, which are used to control chain reactions. To circumvent regulations that would have forced a plant shutdown, workers slowed down the control rod testing, said the report. Inspectors from the NRC knew about both the problem with the rods and the plant's attempts to skirt past the testing, according to the UCS, but failed to respond properly." Source: Report reveals U.S. nuclear plant safety issues

Don't be too quick to excuse private enterprise, there's enough "blame" to go around.

There's always room for an extra quadruple redundant cooling system, but in the end cost cutting does feed in the ultimate ability to build a project. If we build anything to withstand everything it is often no longer economical to build it.

And that, right there, is exactly why greedy profit-seekers should not build nuclear reactors.

We were panicked about C# a while ago. And we've gotten somewhat more relaxed about it. It's certainly something to be concerned about, given the amount of resources Microsoft can bring to bear. But I've had conversations with developers. It has not been that big an issue with developers. It's actually been much more a public relations issue than a reality issue. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082-817522.html#ixzz1HumJH5sb

Like it or not, Apple is the most wanted brand lof tablets and phones. You can add flash, hdmi, double rainbows to your tablet but if Steve Jobs didn't produce it then it is regarded as pig shit by the masses.

You know what's funny? The #1 best selling smartphone brand in 2010 in Canada, US, UK, and Latin America was Blackberry.

The big news in early March wasn't that Android overtook Apple in share of US smartphone subscribers -- it was that Android overtook RIM. Apple doesn't and hasn't even come close. See for yourself:

October 2010: Apple 24.6%, Android 23.5%, RIM 35.8%
January 2011: Apple 24.7%, Android 31.2%, RIM 30.4%

Given the data, it doesn't appear that Apple is even close to the "most wanted" brand of smartphone, let alone phones in general.

Apples status = Told.

They seem to be getting behind it. Reportedly they're going to have a regular Android App marketplace on the thing. There are rumors of an official full Android software update. Why fight it? The more people who buy it, the cheaper the economies of scale become for their reader.

That's not always true.

(FF4 came out rather well).

There have been several cases that reflect on user-identified grocery store data.

The FBI went trawling through grocery club card data looking for possible Iranian terrorists -- based on what they supposedly eat.

A man was wrongly suspected of arson based on his club card records of having purchased fire starters, and was later exonerated.

There was another case where the supermarket itself, being sued by a customer who slipped, threatened to use his purchase records to show that he was a probable alcoholic.

I'm sure all of the affected people thought the same way you do -- "why should I care?".

But then this article is about Germany, where the citizens know exactly why they should care about dossiers on ordinary citizens.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html

If you believe this article the powers that be should force all porn providers to use IPv6 addresses too. If porn helps push technology forward then this should help IPv6 rollout.

Seriously, this is a great thing for Linux adoption. Tons of companies are going to switch to pure-(F)OSS environments to avoid the issue entirely, like that guitar accessory company that got reamed by the BSA (Ernie Ball). This will counter the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude nicely. Nobody ever got their ass sued off for running (F)OSS.

In what way does WGA make it difficult to pirate Windows? It's optional.

Bill Gates: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-212942.html

I was going to say "You're right," but it turns out there has been a decline:

"The average number of music files downloaded from P2P networks also declined from 35 tracks per person in Q4 2007 to just 18 tracks in Q4 2010, although some downloaded just one or two tracks, while others took hundreds. NPD estimates there were 16 million P2P users downloading music in Q4 2010, which is 12 million fewer than in Q4 2007."

Personally I still download tons of music..... from youtube (and with video) that I store on my backup drive.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20046136-261.html#ixzz1HX4BRo8j

As they don't run an uncensored store, and have, in the past, censored applications based on their arbitrary moral judgements, then it implies anything they allow through their filter is, by that same moral judgement, deemed acceptable by them.

Nonsense. Do you think Penguin Classics condones the word "nigger," (as in Huck Finn), or that Random House approves of pedophilia (Lolita)? It's possible to have standards and not publish a book of fart jokes while at the same time not necessary agreeing with the content put forth in the works that *do* meet your standards. The same applies to apps.

Free speech isn't just to protect speech we agree with -- anyone can do that -- but to protect speech we *disagree* with, however vehemently.

I have to agree with whomever stated that it's disappointing to see Apple fold by mere virtue of a petition. This is especially troubling when lawmakers are pressuring Apple to remove apps as well. Will they bow to that pressure too? Where does it end?

Chrome is a smallish download?

On Mac: Chrome 10: 35MB
                              Firefox 4: 28MB

On Linux: Chrome 10 32-bit rpm: 30MB
                                  Firefox 4 32-bit package: 13MB

On Windows, Chrome's numbers are hard to measure because they use a 500KB installer that then downloads the actual browser. But according to http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20045776-264.html Chrome 10 on Windows is 26MB. Firefox 4 is 12MB.

Errr? In my world I remember something about Oracle suing Google over Java copyrights and patents. Java is licensed under the GPL. Everything in the rest of your post is somewhat hazy.

Google at one point proposed that rackmount computers should be built to run on 12VDC only, so you could have a single 12VDC supply in the rack and get rid of the individual power supplies for the server. Whatever happened to that?

What Google proposed was that computers in general switch from multivoltage supplies to single voltage supplies, not that they switch from single computer supplies to multicomputer supplies.

The individual computers are still fed AC via standard IEC connectors and have individual power supplies*. It's just that those supplies are much simpler and more efficient and can run closer to capacity, since they only have to provide +12VDC instead of the +12, -12, +5, -5, +3.3, +5SB of the ATX standard, most of which are completely pointless these days.

This has nothing to do with having a common power supply for the rack. That's not really desirable for reliability reasons -- power supplies are more complex than PDUs, and so it's easier to keep the most common failure domain sized at the server (which is full of other complicated and sensitive bits that fail frequently). It's also not desirable to have to change to power cords and connectors big enough to carry 10x the amperage.

Anyway my guess as to why this never went anywhere is that it didn't have a big set of manufacturers to push it like ATX did. If Antec and Intel and friends wanted to push this, they could make it happen and we'd all be better for it.

* You can see an old article with a picture of a Google server here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html