Slashdot Mirror

It's not like you would be going in to code the next Microsoft Useless Widget 2.0.

Right. You'll just be porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD.

Or, M$ is hoping enough NetBSD developers, or potential developers, are naive or weak enough to turn quisling. NetBSD is small enough that it is comparable in size to small companies, and taking out enough developers to sink the project is a realistic goal.

It happened to Borland and others. Of the FOSS distros, NetBSD the lowest hanging fruit for such a tactic. Larger distros require other tactics.

Even if the offer is legit, which it probably, isn't, just wasting invaluable developer resources porting Microsoft Useless Widget from Windows CE to NetBSD is a human resources denial of service attack taking developer time away from something useful.

Ideas are ten a penny.

Where the value comes is in the clever execution of those ideas.

Or, to put it another way: Xerox invented the GUI and the mouse. When was the last time you used a GUI that Xerox had produced?

Compaq have been credited with inventing the hard-disk based MP3 player. The last time HP marketed a hard disk based MP3 player, however, it was a rebranded iPod.

They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.

Nokia is open sourcing Symbian as well.

Look, the federal law is that H1B workers are paid the same as American workers in the same job.

Why does this fallacy continue to be perpetuated? It's been shown again and again and again that H1B visa holders are paid less than their domestic counterparts, regardless of what the law might say.

Except environmentalists are supporting nuclear power.

That's certainly not my experience here in the UK. For example, Friends of the Earth are distinctly anti-nuclear and seem to believe that a bunch of wind turbines can solve the whole of the UK's power needs.

More and more environmentalists do support nuclear power, Bjorn Lomborg "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has had an impact on at least some people.

You need a lot less power transmission infrastructure to connect a 3GW power station to the grid than close to a thousand wind turbines spread over a large area. Especially if those turbines happen to be off-shore

Not if they're located near where the power will be used. Centralized power generation I think is a big problem, power should be generated near where it's used. Instead of having large power stations, we should have distributed power generation. Not only will power loss from transmission be cut but coengeration can be done. For instance the steam from a plant can be used to heat buildings near it.

Wind generation and built up areas don't mix - you're not going to be able to site wind turbines in a city.

You can mount solar panels on roofs. New York Michael Bloomberg wants to use off-shore wind farms, small-scale wind installations, and tidal power systems. Actually one of the proposals for the reconstruction of the WTC had a turbine mounted between two towers. It's not the same but I found this: "World Trade Center's Freedom Tower to Feature Wind Turbines". And Bahrain has done something similar.

If you plan to store power you need more wind-turbines in order to over-produce and give you power to store.

Why are you stuck on wind? Other energy sources can be used.

Falcon

This is a space that I've observed for a long long time. I can assure you that if anyone ever gets even remotely close to a replacement for Outlook against an Exchange server (or Exchange against an Outlook client), Microsoft will change the APIs so fast your head will spin off and fly away.

MAPI, AD and such are PROPRIETARY protocols folks, and Microsoft knows they are the keys to the kingdom. That's why all the Exchange clients ever created work ok at the start, but before they can really get going they fall back several steps.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1064

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/12/antitrust-pact-payoff-samba-gets-protocols-from-microsoft.ars

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9836784-39.html

http://news.samba.org/announcements/pfif/

You are quite a bit out of date with that thought.

The amount of concrete and steel used to build a plant is nothing. Consider the amount of materials used to build and maintain windmills, dams, etc.

In one post I said dams also require a lot of concrete and steel. I said in another dams weren't clean either. Wind genies on the other had don't require nearly as much of either. Neither the genie nor the tower use much steel and no concrete. The pad does use both but not much of either. Check "Home Power magazine, many people erect their owe wind genies. Here's their Wind Turbine Buyer's Guide. I didn't check to see if it said anything about them but there are a number of turbines up to 5 megawatts in capacity. The CNet article "GE reshapes the future of wind power" has a quote saying 2 to 3 megawatt genies are the "most efficient and the best cost per kilowatt" by Stephane Renou "who manages research and development for General Electric's wind technology platform." Wind genies don't need to be cited in the middle of nowhere either. Here in Minnesota , as can be done elsewhere, produce farms such as corn farms have wind genies cited on them. This actually helps farmers, the pads for the genies don't take up much space yet the farmers get paid for how much electricity is produced. So far MN has 615 megawatts of wind power installed, California has 2,096 megawatts. And whereas it takes years to build a nuclear power plant wind genies can be mounted on erected towers in months if not weeks. Erect 10 5 megawatt genies a month and you add 600 megawatts a year. Say it takes 5 years to build a nuclear power plant in that tyme enough wind genies can be erected to generate 3 gigawatts. The Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station was the last nuclear power plant to go online in the US. Construction started in 1973 and wasn't finished until 1996. It took more than 30 years yet it's capacity is only 1,167 megawatts. Enough wind genies can be erected within 2 years to generate the same amount of electricity. Check out T Boone Pickens' Picken's Plan. While I don't know much about it myself, I've been following alternative energy some 30 years. The Rocky Mountains alone, which the plan considers, has enough potential wind power to power the 48 continuous states. However as the Wind Atlas shows there are plenty of other states with abundant wind power.

Mining for uranium can be and is done safely and cleanly.

Oh really? What happens to the tailings? Do they disappear? The Navajo have nothing to worry about? Neither do any of the other indigenous people on who's land uranium is mined?

Waste is "bad" because it's still radioactive.
This is where smaller plants, like the ones being developed for neighborhoods, come into play.

And where are these plants? Can you show me one?

Hell, Chernobyl was deemed fine in 2005, less than 20 years after the worst-case scenario, which doesn't even apply in modern plant designs.

Claimed fine by whom? Certainly not by Belarus. Oh but I guess the Zone of alienation means nothing.

There is simply nothing we have a handle on that can compete with nuclear power.

Okay then, let Wall Street pay for them. They won't, unless they get more massive subsidies. Give alternative sources of energy as much in subsidies as coal and nuclear power gets and I be

There are a lot of places where the majority of power comes from nuclear and hydro.

Yes, and both of those power sources use a lot of energy to build. Then for nuclear there's pollution from mining as well as the waste.

Also, the real risk of CFLs is caused by the fact that any pollution from it is local and concentrated as a point source

Over a period of years I replaced almost all of my incandescent light bulbs with CFLs. As one burnt out I got a CFL to replace it. A point source of mercury is easier to handle than air born mercury. As for possibly breaking one, I try to use measures to reduce any possibility of breakage.

Also, consider that the plumes from garbage dumps invading your water supply

CFLs are supposed to be recycled and not thrown in the trash. Of course some people do throw them away, either because they don't care or because they don't know better. Even so, that's still less mercury in the environment than the amount of mercury that would be emitted to produce the power to light today's incandescent lights.

Which is why I hope these LEDs, or others, that are good for area lighting come onto the market within a couple of years.

trace mercury emitted into the atmosphere a hundred miles away from the city....

Not all power plants are 100 miles away from the city. There's more than one power plant in South Bronx. NYC has 25 plants serving it. The first ones built by Con Edison, used the used steam to heat neighborhood buildings.

Falcon

Or it's Cox playing on the misconception that people might have that this does effect cable, allowing them to say "Yes you must rent a digital cable box and pay more for digital cable. Have you heard about legislation to mandate the switch to digital broadcasting?" It's not like they said congress required them to change....but people could think so and so now it's not Cox (or comcast's) fault the bill is going up. See here for one such story.

This article should be linked in the summary, not the one that is over a month old.

Yep, this is why I'd like to learn the real nitty-gritty details of what this partnership means in terms of throttling/disconnecting p2p traffic.

The cited RIAA email doesn't give many hard details:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10127050-93.html?tag=mncol;txt

"We believe a user on your network is offering an infringing sound recording for download through a peer to peer application. We have attached below the details of the infringing activity." - but WHICH recording, and WHICH p2p application? No mention in the generic email - I guess details are supposedly provided for each actual instance. But what recordings SPECIFICALLY will they be looking for? One would assume, commercial releases by RIAA acts; but will they distinguish between those and commercially unreleased live concert recordings with some of the same songs?

I have utorrent going 24/7, and approximately 0% of what's going up or down is commercially released music/media. I'm on AT&T DSL (since they ate SBC, which is who I signed up with), and my only other broadband option is Comcast, whom I've been happy to avoid. Never had any serious complaints about AT&T's service up till now - I've always gotten a reasonable approximation of the bandwidth they claim to be selling me, never had any appreciable downtime, yadda,... but if they start indiscriminately whacking my encrypted p2p packets, it'll be time to start bootin' some heads.

Missing original CNET News article link :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10151389-93.html

You mean the patent the filed at Christmas? Here's an article on it with a link to the patent.

Incidentally, they've been planning it since the Longhorn days (2002ish), at least with some applications like Office.

I probably missed any Slashdot article while I was away for Christmas break (and failed a search, so not sure what the title was).

This system allows you to use the web interface without having to configure an e-mail client. The Google Gears plug-in already works in Docs and Reader in the background. This is one more step forward in making it acceptable for businesses.

Oh, and before FUDders like Gartner analyst David Smith start the talking point of "New features help make Gmail more compelling for business customers, but for many, a bigger problem is the fact that Gmail still sports its beta tag. " Google Apps (including Gmail) isn't beta for paying customers.

To argue that Microsoft is a monopoloy is retarded, they are not and never have been...

You really think a U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is retarded?

Yep, overloading the SI prefixes worked well for years. Maybe you and I understand the overloading, but many people don't, and it's unnecessarily confusing. I think the fact that a class action suit was brought against Seagate as a result of this confusion indicates that overloading the SI prefixes hardly 'works well'.

....He said consumers would face a jarring experience due to multiple Windows versions customized by PC makers and uncertainty about the interface or whether applications would run on them.

So what changed, Bill?

He was objecting to "multiple Windows versions customized by PC makers". So, to answer your question on Bill's behalf, nothing changed.

Yes, they're talking about multiple versions, but that's no different than Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista. So again, this would be standard operating procedure, pardon the pun. But it is clear that this article is not saying that the PC makers could sell their own custom Windows versions.

PC vendors who want to sell customized operating systems will sell Linux, as they do today.

In court, Gates also argued that multiple versions of Windows would essentially stifle competition by confusing consumers and putting developers "into a situation like the computer industry was before the PC came along." He said consumers would face a jarring experience due to multiple Windows versions customized by PC makers and uncertainty about the interface or whether applications would run on them.

So what changed, Bill?

The FSF could let the TIVO hole work _for_ them -- Require all plugins to link against a small (512 byte or so?) GPL'ed blob, and check for it at load time.

That has been tried before, and the courts said it doesn't work that way.

News article that mentions an older case (while discussing one that was ongoing):

Pre-DMCA cases involving video game consoles concluded that it was legal to copy code for the purposes of interoperability, Litman said. In Sony v. Connectix, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that it was legal for Connectix to copy the Sony PlayStation's BIOS for the purpose of interoperability.

The outcome of the case that article was about:

With these principles in mind, the majority opinion held that the district court had erred in three ways. First, it had held that the Toner Loading Program was copyrightable simply because it "could be written in a number of different ways", without considering the practical realities. [18] Second, because of this mistaken standard, it had refused to consider whether or not the alternative Toner Loading Programs proposed by Lexmark were practical.[19] Third, it had concluded that the Toner Loading Program was not a "lock-out code", because it had not sufficiently considered how difficult it would be for SCC -- without Lexmark's knowledge of the code's structure and purpose -- to alter the code and still pass the printer's authentication mechanisms.[20]

It is not at all impossible. There are several models that do not have cameras.

Here are a few: http://reviews.cnet.com/best-basic-phones/

They have always said that the Zune was a "long term Strategy". The biggest reason their sales are down is because of last years 30GB zune Price chopping. Even CNet said that they met their internal numbers. Fact is that Microsoft isn't trying to replace the ipod, and even if they are, so what? at least Apple has a competent competitor for their products instead of just a bunch of $29.99 Coby MP3 crappers from walgreens.

I agree that the lion's share of money generally goes to the lawyers (and sometimes the original class-representative litigants), but for the past decade or so in the U.S. after some reforms, most settlements are in cash, not vouchers or coupons. They are, however, usually not a large amount of cash. For example, I got a check for about $11 from some California state class-action lawsuit against record labels for price-fixing; the Grand Theft Auto settlement gave purchasers are a choice of a replacement disc or $5-35 cash depending on what damages they asserted and/or had documentation of; and a recent iPod settlement will pay out $15-25 cash.

Bill Gates to Congress: Let us hire more foreigners

what do you mean by full support from developers? Do you mean having software for the system like adobe? They are starting to get there as flash has been on a parallel release for a short time. There are other developers working on linux now too but your right it's not just there yet. Well if that's what you mean by full support of developers. But no OS has the FULL support can't run garage band on windows can you?

The main reason I wanted to respond was because you also said until you can go to walmart to buy linux software it will never work. I guess you haven't seen the news http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/10/200-everex-gree.html/ http://news.cnet.com/Walmart.com-to-sell-more-Linux-software/2100-1012_3-5066148.html/ or http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202805941/

Also typically the point of linux is that you don't have to go out and buy the software, it comes with the OS or with a quick apt-get from a repository. It's free typically you won't see it in the stores for that reason. I would like to see in the future stores selling the CD's and DVD's of distros, as well as openoffice and other alternatives for the cost of production and shelving but I don't think they need to for it to catch on. You just need enough people who have had a good experiance with it for it to start being a force.

I'm not a linux fan boi I don't think that it's had a large effect on Microsofts market but it has definatly changed it. Linux is a large part of the embeded market, they had Microsoft playing catchup in the netbook market, and distro's like ubuntu are getting closer and closer to being where they need to, to take on Microsoft. I would argu for most people it's there.

I never knew about Ernie Ball switching, but I was just thinking about buying new guitar strings and that article somewhat bumped up my opinion of them. Not that their switch to Linux will make my guitar sound better, but I think it's good to support a company that does that.

The answer is, "not very much"

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-3.html

That's because people value time highly.

10k extra over the life of a car. My car's 14 years old. That 4k savings up front? It's a great deal, the extra $400/yr would be lost in the noise.

$300 dollars savings on something that's going to be obsolete in 5 years? Again good deal. at 17c/kwh, it takes a lot of hours of watching to use up that $300. Let's say a plasma uses 50% more power than an LCD. At the high-end, plasma's seem to use 400w.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-3.html

US$300/0.17c = 1765kwh
Extra power needed for plasma = 200wh per hour
1765kwh * 1000 = 1765000wh / 200wh = 8825 hours.

or, about 4 years of 40 hours a week of viewing.

The DRM is indeed no surprise, but the fact that they're doing this after having just gotten through pulling the plugs on the authentication servers for a completely different music service is. Apparently it didn't fail bad enough to make them not want to try again.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9926476-7.html

It's not just these guys. Sony is laying off 16K (10%) employees worldwide:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10118970-92.html

Downsizing is the biggest news these days. It effects every industry. Christmas party downsizing alone had a big impact on the food catering industry:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/family/articles/2008/12/13/downsizing_christmas/

Things are not looking good. Unless Obama starts strengthening the dollar and stimulating job growth then it's going to only get worse. Bailouts are not the way to do it though.

So yesterday, IBM posted great profits that beat wall street estimates. And today they're doing layoffs? That makes no financial sense to me. Why should any company lay off people just because "Everyone else is doing it"?

Not quite "dead and buried" - turns out that some broadcasters are using it anyway and some tuners are obeying it anyway. In fact, our buddy Microsoft is lead[ing] the charge.

Not just Microsoft. The last time I tried to record a college football game from KLKN-DT, it was flagged "Copy Once". I could get neither VLC nor MPEG Streamclip on my Macintosh to play the resulting recording. I could however play recordings from the same game broadcast on KETV-DT that were marked "Copy Freely". Recording application was AVC Video Cap (which requires recompilation with patches to do delayed timed recording as of 2009, left as an exercise for the reader).

The infamous Broadcast Flag--the only element of DRM to have ever loomed over broadcast television--is dead and buried. Besides, none of the DTV converters currently available have any DRM-compliance built in.

Not quite "dead and buried" - turns out that some broadcasters are using it anyway and some tuners are obeying it anyway. In fact, our buddy Microsoft is lead the charge.

So, while the BF remains voluntary, that doesn't help the poor schmucks who get stuck with a system that has "voluntarily" given away their option to ignore the BF.

>The infamous Broadcast Flag--the only element of DRM to have ever loomed over broadcast television--is dead and buried. Besides, none of the DTV converters currently available have any DRM-compliance built in.

You must be using a meaning for 'dead and buried' that I'm not aware of.

If this were so, then there would be no way to turn it on. And if it were turned on, then nobody would looking at this flag. Neither is true. Otherwise, the Microsoft debacle (is that redundant?) would not have happened.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9946780-7.html

And big media are working hard to close the analog hole ASAP. Like their recent application (which was denied) to disable DVR's and analog outputs in exchange for letting people see movies in HD earlier than they have been releasing them to TV now.

And aren't HD analog outputs going to be turned off in 2010 or 2011?

• Citi Card Virtual Account Numbers
• AmEx disposable credit cards
• PayPal Virtual Credit Card Payment

It won't, Microsoft just figures if they lie often enough there will be enough suckers who believe it.

Or actually try it and see if it works?

Not to mention that McNealy is a blabbermouth who tends to exaggerate. Remember when he claimed that "ZFS will be the file system for OS X"? The reality was a little different, Apple supported ZFS but it was by no means the default file system.

Marketing has two meanings to people in open source.

The first is "advertising". Advertising is great, anyone can volunteer to do it. People donate to buy ads, create them, and do crazy grassroots activities like chalking a Firefox logo in the campus quad. Of course, it's crazy expensive to buy an ad in the NYTimes, or put the Tux logo on a race car.

The second meaning is "market research", and frankly, that's insane. Ubuntu is free of charge, as is Debian and a zillion others. Market research in corporations are used to direct investment. I.e. telling engineers what to do. This is not compatible with volunteerism. Sure Canonical employs engineers and tells them what to do, but the way they make money is basically through consulting. I know tons of software consultants; none of them need market research because they already have a market paying their bills. Open source basically operates sans market research, on the theory that the people who know exactly what they want are best able to make it happen ("scratching an itch").

If you happen to disagree, great. But you'll have to take a guerrilla approach. I've observed the Ubuntu marketing project for a while and the thing basically falls apart from two basic conflicts: confusion over whether marketing is "research to direct effort" or "advertising," and a fundamental lack of engagement with the people who's efforts to be directed. Dodging the first problem is simple and just takes motivation and a little leadership. The second problem is much harder; a lot of people with marketing experience don't correctly understand how Linux and OSS differs from their own experiences in the corporate world.

That got shot down; a judge ruled that just having the file available for download did not constitute damages unless there was proof that that file had been downloaded.

Push people to "do without" and they might do just that. They may also become entirely too good at it in the process.

(emphasis mine) You mean just like this guy's story?

I think the idea is that your computer manufacturer (or installation cds) could determine what browser (and presumably other software) goes on your computer.

...and this would be different from what we've got now in what way, precisely? OEMs and users already have the ability to totally hide IE, block its entry points, set the defaults (browser, mail client, java vm, media player, etc) they want. They've had this ability since XP SP1.

In fact, as those articles will show you -- they've done so much more that they are now recognized as one of the leaders in developing secure software. I think you're basing your opinions on slightly old data. Your views are valid for MS products released 3/4 years ago or older.

SCO is dead. They'll convert to liquidation any day now. At least one would hope so. Nobody knows how long that zombie has to shamble.

there's no such thing as no lawsuit exposure.

That is true enough but to accept that as a premise is to refuse to do business. There is some middle ground where businesses can still operate in where the risk is acceptible. Limiting your exposure by avoiding licensing agreements that include the right to sue you if you overdeploy seems wise, and licensing agreements that include the right to audit you more so. Especially when there are options available that include terms like "use all you want for free".

(i'd like to see documented example of it)

Meet Ernie Ball. But wait... that wasn't Microsoft... that was their representatives, the Business Software Alliance! Same same. Evil by proxy is still evil.

What's wrong with Micosoft's licensing model? You pay either per server or per seat. If you license some servers per server, and some per seat their monitoring software tells you how often you need to "true up", and if their software fails to do its math correctly they get to sue you and seize all your computers. That makes a lot more sense than Linux or BSD's licensing model where no matter how many clients or servers you have you don't have to pay. That's just anarchy.

The biggest failure of Windows 7...

The product has to be released before it can fail. Remember that you're bashing a beta.

And yeah, if it has even one port open to the Internet in its default configuration on ship day, it's hosed. The targeted exploits will begin on day zero, and by six months they'll be commonly known. And then a patch will be issued that won't be applied by everyone because automatic updates break too much stuff. And so we'll have another worm like Conficker. Again. Because why would we learn from history?

But if it otherwise works OK noone will care. [sigh]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/20/1624253

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/21/1543234

It was also on Wired: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/encryption-stil.html

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/cold-boot-disk-encryption-attack-is-shockingly-effective/

Schneier's blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html

Information week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801184

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/cold_boot_utilities/

Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10003167-83.html

PC World http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,762-page,1-bid,0/video.html

Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/19/cold-boot-encryption.html

It was even on reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS163325+27-Feb-2008+PRN20080227

It's not an obscure thing, you are just ignorant of major technology news. Perhaps the summary should define "CPU" and "linux" for you as well, just in case you don't what they are either.

All that retreat mumbo-jumbo at the moment is just the precursor to what will be brought against the people in 2009 and beyond. Obama has selected an RIAA supporting ass. attourney general with David Ogden and now that the industry has a seat on the presidents team and wan't to "cooperate" with ISPs they don't need these awful lawsuits anymore.

My piratey sense is tingling ... I sense a great disturbance in the warez.

But you'd rather have Adobe dominate the market instead?

Say what you will about Microsoft, but to me they're clearly the superior choice both from a technological as well as ethical standpoint in this thing.

Belkin have a history of dodgy behavior and should be avoided where possible. Their last trick was hijacking something like 1 in every thousand http connections and directing them to an advertising site.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1039_3-5104863.html

This company should be avoided where possible.

See here.

Actually, all computer parts and electronics sellers are abusive, to some degree, in my experience. The problem was just that Circuit City was worse that others. My experience of them was that no one who worked there had any technical knowledge.

CompUSA was worse than Circuit City in my experience. (That's pronounced com-POOZ-a to show the proper low respect.) The predictable happened. The title of that article is: "CompUSA closes shop".

Incredible Universe had a unique formula. They abused their sales people; I was told that and observed that. The predictable happened: Incredible Universe crashes to earth. Actually it crashed to under the earth.

I remember Future Shop in the U.S. as being a confused place. The predictable happened in 1999: Future Shop closing U.S. stores.

Most of the problem with computer retail stores is the same as with any technology company: There are managers who think they can run a technology company without actually understanding their products.

Does anyone know of an online computer and electronics equipment seller that is not abusive?