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The KDS Rad-5 is just about the BEST Price / Performance LCD i've come across. About $350 , 15" and Ultra-thin. The quality is amazing, 300:1 contrast ratio does a good job to deliver nice whites. Check out this CNET Review . Users rating is 90% Im not an anonymous coward, im just lazy!

This is a computerised system, it should be that as soon as it hits the expiry date (maybe +1 week at the most incase there is a delay in payment) the domain is deregistered and removed from whois, and available free for all again.

I'm sure his comment had something to do with the recent horrible security breach found in Windows XP, one that lets an attacker totally take over an XP box.

I'm also sure that Microsoft's patch has fixed that breach, although there will probably be others.

If you like XP and want to use it, that's fine by me. It just seems odd to me that some guy got moderated up to 5 pointing out an "error" that wasn't. Oh well, it's no big deal.

steveha

Here are some:
Forbes Preview
Cnet Top 10 List from CES (Rio Riot is 2nd)
TechTV Preview

I'm just noting that it requires an (expensive) add-on card for most PCs :)

Expensive? Expensive my ass! :)

RISC's are above 1GHz :)
UltraSparc III @ 1.05GHz
Alpha 21264 @ 1.001GHz

Wasn't that Iridium's business model? It didn't do Motorola a whole lotta good, either, even after they bought a $2B system from $25M.

woof.

If we all save the money we aren't spending on condoms, we could buy AOL/T-W next year! Or not, when you look at the bucks Rusty's raking in.

Let's see, BeOS failed to find a market that wanted to buy their (nice) OS with few apps, even in the multimedia segment they claimed to excel in, and Macintosh clones were dependent on a license from Apple, who were very slow/reluctant to make them available in the first place, and then stopped again.

The PC architecture seems to me to be driven by component manufacturers. Video cards, BIOS, CPU, this years fast serial bus replacement, whatever. People like MS add support for those things, not the other way around.

I think SSCA is about the only way that such a decision could be forced on the hardware vendors (not systems, but hardware), and even then - do you know how much of the global PC market is the US? I don't [*], but for companies that already make things for different languages, video standards and voltages, having a US-destined crippled part, and rest-of-the-world non-crippled part isn't so far fetched either (see, I don't live in the US, and nor do ASUS, Toshiba, or Abit - we live with the other 95% of the world's population).

[*] The nearest I could find was one article from Nov 2000 suggesting that "Asia, Japan and Latin America get 25 percent of the output of the PC market." Obviously, that doesn't mention Europe.

Hoo-ray for small miracles, an actual judge with sense not to be bamboozled by 300 lawyers (and a complicit prosecution) in a case involving MS. I think Apple, Red Hat, et al. deserve credit where credit is due in this by effectively presenting to the court why this would've been a bad deal. C|net also has an updated story on this, sugesting the possibility of a greater-than $1B penalty for MS now from Judge Motz' comments.

But this case, like the antitrust case, is not yet over. While we can't do anything to influence the next flimsy settlement for price-gouging MS will probably try to come out with here, maybe we can make a difference in the antitrust case by writing the DoJ. Public comment period ends January 28, 2002. Do write, but polite & reasoned letters only, please.

Recently law makers have been showing resistance to industry execs who are pushing cd copy-protection. Here is a recent story on this. The recording industry according to this article is rethinking copy protection all together.

Cnet holds an article about.

This is the 50th /. story about Lessig since the first one three years ago. As court appointed master in the MS-DOJ case, he'd sworn that he had no personal bias or prejudice, even though he'd sent an email to a lawyer friend at Netscape saying that having installed IE was equivalent to selling his soul. An appellate court kicked him off the case shortly thereafter.

He continues to be a voice of reason and intelligent debate in an arena where both are often sorely lacking. Our community is richer for his presence.

More details also at cNet News. Its been there for a couple of hours, and I thought about posting it but was too lazy.

article here.

Whenever I go to purchase any kind of consumer electronic whatever, I scope it out on Shopper.cnet.com . I get pretty dang good information from them, and usually decent feedback from the users also.
However, if a vendor is aware that a review is going to be done of their product, it is obviously in their best interest to make sure that the reviewer has all the information they need.
When that is offered, and the reviewer doesn't take advantage, what recourse does the vendor have?

You mean like this treaty?

I'm afraid it's too late to worry about that.

I thought they were delaying it (with no future date announced).

"We retain the option to do (Solaris on Intel) in the future," said Graham Lovell, Sun's director of Solaris product marketing. "But given where we are with the economy, we'd rather focus on our bottom line and make sure we spend our money wisely. We'd rather defer Solaris on Intel to a later date." from cnet news

• http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-8409777.html? tag=mn_hd
• http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0108sunintel.htm l?nw

An article on C|Net just reported DoubleClick doesn't find personalized ad profiles to be profitable:

• The New York-based company jettisoned its "intelligent" targeting service effective Dec. 31, a company representative confirmed Tuesday. Launched in 2000, the product allowed marketers to target ads based on a database of some 100 million profiles. The technology tracked people online anonymously and then served ads based on personal tastes.

• Big claims, no demo, no papers, and it doesn't work yet.
• It's headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. Unclear why, but Southern Florida has been a major scam center for decades.
• They're trying to get people to invest, publicly advertising for "accredited investors". It's not usually done that way. If they went to a VC for funding, the technology would get looked at, hard. (If it worked, getting VC funding for this would be easy.) If they went for an IPO, they'd have to file disclosures with the SEC under penalty of perjury.
• They claim: "All of these traditional methods are being enhanced by ZeoSync through collaboration with top experts from Harvard University, MIT, University of California at Berkley, Stanford University, University of Florida, University of Michigan, Florida Atlantic University, Warsaw Polytechnic, Moscow State University and Nankin and Peking Universities in China, Johannes Kepler University in Lintz Austria, and the University of Arkansas, among others." Yeah, right. Let's see some names.
• The Flash animation on the web site appears to be constructed entirely with stock photography. There's no useful information in the images. (Maybe that's their approach to compression.)

Scroll down to Incredible Claims for descriptions of the last four scams like this. Remember Pixelon?

Maybe it's not when Apple would have wanted it, but Time did "the right thing" from a journalist's perspective. They "broke the story", which is what journalists are paid to do.

c|net has an article about the new iMac, basing most of its report off of the Time article (which was available at newsstands and airports in New York last night, btw)

c|net has an article about the new iMac, basing most of its report off of the Time article (which was available at newsstands and airports in New York last night, btw)

as seen here http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-8392837.html? tag=tp_pr. It also looks like they lifted data from the timecanada.com page.

-motardo

There is a bit of difference of scale going on here. Such wonders of modernity are a bit easier with 1/8th the population.

Though I could be wrong.
That Weasel

According to this CNet article, the 1/14 issue of Time hit newsstands in NYC on Sunday night, iMac on the cover and e'ythang. No need for the conspiracy theories this time.

1. If Steve Jobs were an idiot, he wouldn't have asked when the article would hit shelves. Jobs is not an idiot, ergo he knew, as does C|Net , that this is also in this week's Time (US) magazine - which hit newsstands on Sunday in New York.
2. Jobs probably had a tough debate with himself. Either he could deny a story for Time until after the launch - meaning waiting until next Sunday when it would've been to late - or he could let Time put it on shelves and websites, and let a few people see it (but not as many as will see it tomorrow), and have their new product front and centre on every newsstand on the continent come Monday morning. I'd hate to leak it early, but I'd hate more to sensationalize late. I'm sure Jobs felt the same.
3. What could Apple possibly do, other than deny interviews from Time Magazine? Unless they had a contract (which I doubt), then this is perfectly acceptible reporting. It's not slander or libel, it's an article as true as can be accepted. If Apple doesn't like it, they can lump it.
4. I sincerely doubt there's a single webmaster that controls this sort of thing. Likely the webmasters write/debug the scripts that drive the page, and the editors and so on are the ones that actually do the posting/managing.

first, according to cnet they are comparing a $339 part to a $364 part.

second, why make such a big deal to have all those charts and numbers that show how much faster the xp is, if they dont even use the fastest intel? why not run it against a celeron?

third, tom's review is out

Didn't see a picture of the new one like they had over at Time -- but then when I clicked the "what to expect" link they told me they appreciated my patience while they worked on making the media stream work with my browser. (Mozilla 0.9.5 on Linux.)

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-8080960.html? tag=lh

A reminder is perhaps due here that the first internet worm program to cause significant damage (the Morris worm) was released in the 1988 and infected UNIX systems through a well known vulnerability (yep, good ole gets(3)) in the fingerd daemon.

And waddaya know,UNIX application programmers are _still_ using the occasional gets(3) call in setuid root programs, more than a decade later...

The Morris worm is a nice spectre to pull out of the Unix closet and remind everyone that Unix is not infallable. Just look at all the damage done in the early internet days! Spooky.

However, this is history - ancient by Interent standards. Since then, there have been other Unix-based worms to hit the net at large. I can name three more recent examples off-hand. Sadmind spread amoung Solaris hosts to deface IIS sites. The ramen worm attacked Linux (specifically RedHat) hosts. And there were reports of ramen code being modified and sent on its way. And then there was another Linux worm called li0n.

In each case the worm hit the wild, was discovered and reported, had a brief life as appropriate counter measures were taken, then faded out. Missing was the media frenzy one would expect with something as damaging as the Morris worm. That came later on a different platform with a different worm: Code Red.

Once again - Unix is not infalliable. But various generations have been in the trenches dealing with infosec issues for years. Recent incidents have began to show off its experience, versitility, and resiliance. It is small wonder the Unix crowd tends to look at virus issues with almost a disinterest compared to their Windows counterparts who are burned either more often or more severely by such a threat.

Of course, you can also download WhenU directly at CNet's Downloads.com. The "customer" reviews are amusing, as half of them are obvious fakes from the company, and the other half are pissed off real people. You can read them here.

So is this about a legitimate choice in operating software, or is it about nepotism?

The company, which wrote the Chinese version of Linux, was set up in August 1999 by the China Academy of Science, the nation's top science institute, headed by President Jiang Zemin's son Jiang Mianheng, and government-owned Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital.

I think, before we look to any altruistic reasoning on the part of Beijing on choosing "Linux" over "Microsoft" we need to look closer to home ... to their homes.

It is all over comedy central too. I watch that channel more than any other (by far) and Impostor is being promoed to death on that channel as well.

I would have thought comedy central, sci-fi, and dimension (film distributor) was all owned by the same company, but that is not the case, so actual money did change in promoting this movie.

Sci-Fi is owned by USA Networks (which was just bought by Universal/Vivendi, the same company that owns mp3.com)

Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, says this site.

Dimension is owned by Miramax, which is owned by Disney -- says this site and this site.

I don't watch too much tv, but you would think that Disney would plug the movie on ABC and ESPN, which it also owns, especially since they are hurting for cash right now. Why not promote in house?

How is this related to Impostor? Only tangentially. But be aware of the Big Six media companies. Three are involved in this film. It's more than six, but the other companies are AOL/TimeWarner, Sony, NewsCorp, and Bertelsmann (of Napster fame).

Others would add GE to the list, because they own NBC.

In any case, the entirety of our information and entertainment world comes nearly exclusively through those 8 companies.

There's an interesting interview on News.com with Virginia governor Jim Gilmore about Internet taxation. One of his points is that Internet taxation might fragment the Internet as a global community. Could it be that there exists at least one politician with a clue about technological issues? Here's one of the Q/As:

CNET: The European Union is moving toward requiring companies located outside of its borders, especially those in the United States, to collect taxes on digital downloads. What do you think about that? Is that something that the U.S. government should try to block?

Gilmore: This is very draconian. It is tamping down commerce. It raises the specter of Internet sellers across the rest of the world being discriminated against and not having the opportunity to take advantage of their own national philosophy and system of government. And I certainly hope that the European Union doesn't go that way.

I think that it's clear that we should not be taxing Internet access. I don't think we should be taxing downloaded products. And I don't think that we should be taxing retail either. In order to even achieve it, you would have to try to track down people as to what their location is, what their private business is in order to force people beyond their jurisdictions to collect and remit taxes. And that's bad policy.

Well, it has been done with pigeons, so I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to do it with rats.

Re: "Here is the big thing with Microsoft"
This is not the beginning of a flame war. I repeat this not the beginning of a flame ware.
Some parts of this article you could just have taken straight from Craig Mundie's mouth. Three of four months ago when Microsoft was spreading FUD about Linux, Mundie tried desperately to link Linux and the failure of the dot-coms three or four months ago. As other people have noted this was more a product of timing than anything else. Correlation not cause.

He also talks about it in this recent interview (shortly).

Remember a while ago when Cringely wrote the article about Microsoft building their own version of TCP/IP?

I really thought that Cringely had misheard some information at that point. I couldn't see how or why Microsoft would want to do that.

Then I read the interview with Bill Gates that was part of C|Net's end-of-year wrap-up. Check out this quote:

[C|Net] As described by Microsoft, HailStorm has to be hosted on servers globally for the system to work. How do you plan to do that and ensure security?
[Gates] "We are doing a lot. All of those things are being done with other people. The very protocols of the Internet will evolve for security and quality of service and richer caching. And so we are out talking with the Ciscos and the Akamais and Intel--you name it--for that level of stuff." [italics mine]

All I can say is: wow.

How much do you want to bet that Microsoft will be calling this "Secure TCP/IP"?

CNet says they did

Dale Fuller: The new barbarians? is an interesting article about borland's resurgence as a real company in the marketplace, from thier slump for the past several years. The article doesn't really come out and say it, but the reason borland is doing well now, and wasn't before, is the personnel. I find it amusing that they don't just come out and say it, but they refer, again and again to the "departures of key staffers" when they started their decline, and now, according to Fuller, "one of the major indicators is the number of cool programmers who want to work here--and we're now getting people back from Microsoft, from universities, from all over the world." I guess what Robert A. Heinlein said is true: "brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value."

This one is a scary read, Richard Parsons: Why the Web Can't Remain Free It's not as if we get it free now. ISPs, computer, eyestrain, carpel tunnel, backaches, etc. I would do less shopping than I do now, between Amazon, Ebay, Ubid, and others. Free? It's not free now Mr Parsons.....

Heh, well... even if Network Solutions did make lots of money because of this, in the end it didn't really help them as they were aquired by VeriSign last year.

"The only copy protection on my iPod is the fact that it's a one-way sync. And for what it's worth, it's a LOT LOT LOT harder to do a 2-way sync than a one-way sync."

I've also been looking into HDTVs. And here is a question I've wanted to ask somebody, and hopefully there is someone here that might be able to answer it.

Which looks better, 720p or 1080i? I've noticed that a lot of HDTV don't do 720p and "upgrade" any 720p signals to 1080i. How does this affect the image quality?

As far as I can find, he best HDTV (well technically it's a "monitor" b/c it has no built-in tuner; you need to use a cable box or VCR or something) I've seen is from Princeton. Thier AF3.0HD looks to be the best one out there. And you can find it for less than half of the $4000 MSRP online right now. CNET has a good review of the Princeton Ai3.6HD. (I think the main difference is the aspect ratio between this one and the AF3.0HD).
If anyone owns one of these tell me what you think.

Hai! I get a strong sense of deja vu reading this non-news headline. Anyone remember Ambra? I remember trying to run Windoze NT 3.5 on one with a IBM 386SLC cpu. Very slow, and could only be booted from a floppy due to lack of NT drivers for the then-highly integrated on-board controller, or something like that.

Ummm....you should read this Article dude.

As a SysaAdmin (who never explicitly subscribed) to any of the 3 CMP/techweb publications I now receive weekly/biweekly/monthly or the electronic C|net shite I'm now eternally a "customer" of, it's pretty obvious who pays the bills for the (largely) waste of bandwidth reviews they provide. Wake up... they aren't going to bite they hands that feeds them - particularly MS or Oracle.

While you/I/every other jaded IT employee with half a brain can be critical of this two faced advertising driven BS, the individual with a tight grip on the purse strings for IT expenditures is getting the same mailings & treating them as dogma - because he doesn't know/care that he's being fed crap with a fancy ribbon around it.

Until the push-periodicals are no longer driven by big bucks advertising contracts & therefor biased coverage of these products, IT "managers" will have a steady supply of bullshit benchmarks & reviews IN WRITING to reinforce & perpetuate their decision making process.

-ct