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According to CNet, Apple appears to be looking for a developer to help create iTunes for Windows. Seems like a smart move to me -- the Windows user base is clearly vastly larger than Mac, and Apple will still be getting a slice of online music sales -- plus they give another reason for Windows users to buy an iPod.

I keep hearing great things about iTunes too, in that it's apparantly quite a bit better than most music database software. Personally I'm still looking for a good music db/organizing program for either Linux (preferred) or Windows (thank you samba) - I'm in the process of ripping ~1000 CDs to high bitrate MP3 for my TiVo and am in desperate need for some cataloging and playlist creation tools. From what little I've heard iTunes would fit the bill and do it well... but obviously I still need to find something until then (suggestions welcome).

New Doom3 Image!!!

Gamespot posted this "Exclusive" image yesterday.

This game is going to kick ass!!!

Yup, that is just the app I needed ported to Windows to cause me to switch. Oh, wait, there's still iDVD, iPhoto, Safari, Aqua, etc, etc.

Well, if you had all of them on Windows wouldn't that be a disincentive to switch to a Macintosh? I mean you'd already have all the coolest software! I guess there's the option of making it non-feature complete, either deliberately or just because of differences between the host OSs, but still.

No, I think the real reason they're doing this is to sell music and to promote the AAC standard over proprietary formats. For more on that idea, see this c|net news.com story.

But the government's purpose isn't to provide us with software, it's to provide us a service. They should purchase whatever software best enables them to provide us that service, whether it's open source or not.

CA tried this a while ago too.

You guys are right. I see that they are also looking for someone to create a version of iTunes for Windows also. (Maybe some of you out of workers can apply.)

Perhaps this should be submitted as a separate story, but heck, Google News is lumping it in with this.

According to CNet, Apple appears to be looking for a developer to help create iTunes for Windows. Seems like a smart move to me -- the Windows user base is clearly vastly larger than Mac, and Apple will still be getting a slice of online music sales -- plus they give another reason for Windows users to buy an iPod.

I keep hearing great things about iTunes too, in that it's apparantly quite a bit better than most music database software. Personally I'm still looking for a good music db/organizing program for either Linux (preferred) or Windows (thank you samba) - I'm in the process of ripping ~1000 CDs to high bitrate MP3 for my TiVo and am in desperate need for some cataloging and playlist creation tools. From what little I've heard iTunes would fit the bill and do it well... but obviously I still need to find something until then (suggestions welcome).

For most developers the issue of cross platform is irrelevant.

The enterprise level apps I have been involved with are either Intranet based (and this .NET is perfect) or Windows based. In both cases .NET is a great environment and has strong advantages over Java.

You can cut the framework down for custom applications.

I gave copies of Shakira's "Laundry Service to all my Apple-using friends!
-- Bill Gates III

Unfortunately this is a rehash of old news. The fact that Mobiles, PDAs and Laptops *can* cause interference has been widely known for a long time. Anyone that has flown in the last 5 years will be familiar with the warning to turn off these devices on take off and landing. The possible Ban on laptops etc relate to the introduction of 'ultrawideband' capabilities for these devices which 'could affect a plane's electronics, including its instrument landing system and its collision avoidance systems'. Ultrawideband devices are expected to hit the stores this year, and will range from laptops to PDAs to the following military applications: Since Aircrew will not be able to tell the difference between UWB devices and regular laptops, it seems that a blanket ban may be applied. A good overview of Ultrawideband and its political consiquenses can be found here An article on Ultrawideband and its effects on aeroplanes can be found here

"Economic incentive

The airlines and telecommunications companies also have an economic incentive to keep cell phones turned off in the air. The carriers receive a cut of the revenues from the telephones installed onboard. The two main providers of this air-phone service, GTE Corp. and AT&T Corp., charge about $6 for a one-minute call, more than 20 times typical cell-phone rates.

These in-flight telephones also operate on cellular technology -- using a single airplane antenna to which the onboard phones are typically wired. AT&T and GTE, which recently agreed to sell its Airfone service, decline to discuss air-phone financial arrangements, as do several airlines. But Sheehan says airlines pocket about 15 percent of all air-phone revenue generated on their planes. GTE declines to discuss Airfone revenues, but analysts estimate the unit's annual revenues at $150 million." I'm sure the same applies to all such wireless gizmos.

Yes, they have. It sucked, though.

So, yes, the engineering grunts are having a hard time. Read "Will code for food" by C|Net. The CEO of Google and the CIO of FedEx are living incredibly well on their million-dollar salaries, but the grunt American engineer is not doing well at all. There's mortgage payments, clothes for the kids, insurance bills, etc. The high-tech sector of the overall American economy is going through its worst recession in almost 3 decades.

No. We don't need any more H-1B workers.

On your web site, there's a recent "Michael's Minute" about Intel's failure to provide Linux drivers. This was picked up by everyone's favorite tech tabloid, and a few days later, Intel spokesman Scott McLaughlin was telling CNET that we expect complete Linux driver support for the Intel Centrino mobile technology.

E-mail to Intel support proved unhelpful -- they didn't seem to know anything about Scott McLaughlin's statements. Can you shed some light on this? Is the wireless chipset the primary concern here, or is even getting support for chipset features like DMA for IDE a problem? Have you (or anyone) asked Intel for specs so an open source driver can be written, or is the complaint a lack of drivers just given to us?

Also, is the binary vs. source issue important to you? Of course, it'd be nicest if Intel would produce good open source drivers, but failing that, would you prefer for Intel to release technical information and allow drivers to be written, or do you just want binaries that "go"?

Here's a more detailed C|Net story.

(Yes, it's linked from the posted C|Net story).

Monster.com has already partially retracted this new policy. Now you just can't pick one of the blacklisted countries as a place you'd like to work. News.com has the updated story.

I'm not sure why this AC was rated funny - I think her point is quite insightful. Why would somebody be willing to give Bill Gates money to explore space, if they're not willing to give him money right now when he's using his money for these very important projects?

Remember, Bill Gates has single-handedly donated more money to the UN AIDS research fund than the entire US government. And he's done so willingly, whereas the US government has done so grudgingly.

Of course, I give my money to a man in a penguin suit who probably does not donate his profits, so perhaps I shouldn't criticize others...

Bates earlier ruled that the RIAA was able to subpoena the subscriber's information under existing copyright law, even without an open legal case. Verizon had contended that the trade group needed to file suit against the anonymous subscriber for a subpoena to be valid.

To me, the RIAA is trying to greatly expand its power here. If they really wanted to get this guy, they could file suit, subpoena the documents, and Verizon would just hand them over. What they want is open access to Verizon's documents without judicial oversight. Scary.

Recording radio shows isn't illegal(I hope), this is no different.

True, but (commercial) radio stations pay royalties to ensure artists get their share (http://www.bmi.com/songwriter/resources/pubs/roya ltyradio.asp).

Besides, until the advent of satellite radio, it was imposible to receive a pure, digital feed of a signal being broadcast from a radio station. And you'd better believe that satellite radio companies pay tons in royalites (http://news.com.com/2110-1027-993368.html Thus, your comparison to radio stations is inadequate.

CNET and MP3newswire.net also have stories on this.

our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community

That's certainly true. They have come up with far more innovative ways to introduce fatal security holes, integrate flawed and overly restrictive DRM into their products, and come out with countless patches and service packs that sometimes even break basic system functionality. On top of that, M$ continues to complain that the very existence of open source might actually force them to improve their products! Sorry about that Bill, we obviously miscalculated what a burden we were placing on you. Please let us know what we can do to help your business stay the way it is and keep pissing off your users.

As far it losing out on the server side, most server side projects that I know of currently in development are Linux or BSD as thier base, not Windows, due to the high price of dealing with Redmond.

Here's some non-anectotal info about where the server market is going. And it's not to Windows.

I would have a huge marketing push and go for an big event launch. That should shift anything. How much does Timothy get paid for all the plugs for Microsoft that he writes? Does Slashdot get money from it or just him? Is this part of the misinformation campaign?

DNA based encryption with software developed

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/24/10507773 42470.html

http://news.com.com/2100-1027-998132.html

However, in February, Microsoft signed a pact with Chinese officials to reveal the Windows operating system source code. Bill Gates even hinted that China will be privy to all, not just part, of the source code its government wished to inspect.

Given the evidence suppporting Jim Allchin's testimony, the Microsoft corporation is behaving traitorously, by exposing national security issues to untrusted foreign governments.

Because Cisco is purchasing Linksys.

and in the first line of the article, it states that our beloved Mosaic definitely isn't the first:

Little did they know that their pet project, a humble application named Mosaic, would fundamentally change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had traded hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet.

How reading becomes difficult when you want to post so quickly...

Are you serious? It's a joke--News.com comes up in a web browser as news.com.com. The joke is that they are adding more com's. Slashdot has one TLD--like normal sites.

(Yes, I know it's because CNET's URL is com.com)

Yeah, about that Windows update service, when it got compromised Mr. Schmidt did...? What exactly? Was that "product security" or "infrastructure security"? Or was the actual buffer overflow a product-level security issue, but the unpatched servers a corporate security issue? I wonder which one would have been easier to prevent... Hmmm...

When Microsoft started distributing the NIMDA worm was that the application group's screw-up? Did Mr. Schmidt's security policies extend to internal processes like QA? Surely when they release software internally, Mr. Schmidt's group had to make sure that it was safe, right? Why not give the rest of the world the same courtesy? Does MS have separate internal and external QA groups? If not, do their internal SQL, web, etc servers have holes? Is MS's security policy therefore "crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle"? That's not very reassuring.

I could go on, but rather than be labeled a "troll" for simply pointing out facts and asking rhetorical questions, I'd just like to offer that perhaps, just perhaps, there might be some merit to the whole "security is a process, not a product" idea. Put another way, I for one would feel better if the U.S. Cybersecurity Advisor didn't have a "that's not my department" precedent coloring his judgement. Or maybe I'm taking your statement out of context and unfairly judging Mr. Schmidt for being asleep at the wheel when he was merely in the passenger seat inert, in which case I apologize.

While I certainly have nothing personal against Mr. Schmidt, like it or not he was the front man for Microsoft's "security". If MS gets a bad rap on security issues, for whatever reason, then Mr. Schmidt takes the heat on it -- if only for being the most visible target. And honestly, you can't really say with a straight face that MS's products have nothing to do with its corporate security. Microsoft's products have everything to do with many thousands of other corporations' security. If those products had built with security in mind, maybe there wouldn't need to be this big, mystical demarcation between the security inherent in MS's products and its corporate computing infrastructure. In the public's eye, anyway, there isn't any difference. Microsoft is its products -- and its products have a really appalling track record with regard to security.

-B

Dell is currently number 1 seller of personal computer systems in the world, and so far there have been no plans for Dell to produce any Apple notebooks or desktops. Oh, and by the way, for $700 I can get a 2 GHz, 14.1 inch screen machine with integrated network and stuff. For $700 you can probably buy half an Apple machine, and that's on eBay.

Here are some links to reputable sources that underscore the problem in Chinese society.

Please read " Singapore implicated as piracy hub". This article has a chart showing that the rate of movie piracy for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan is 91%, 25%, and 44%, respectively. Contrast these shocking figures with figures for normal Western countries like Australia and Japan; their rate of movie piracy is 8%.

Please read " China Learns to Say, 'Stop, Thief!'". It explains that Chinese society has a software piracy rate of 92% in 2002 and claims that this figure is an improvement over the rate of 94% in 2001.

This problem of pirating movies and software is a cultural problem, not a legal problem. Most Chinese simply believe that stealing intellectual property is acceptable.

Verizon already started doing this couple of months ago. It's funny - even though Verizon was the one most opposed to this FCC regulation, they started implementing it first. Others, I am guessing will stretch out to November until the deadline.

Personally, I think if they had set a trend of actually rejecting patents that don't belong

Check out this news piece at CNET.
I am living in Hong Kong right now. So I know that I would very much like my cell phone or PDA to warn me of the SARS. Now, just have to figure out which company offers such service.

but your next step should have been to contact the press and community sites

We did, check out LinuxWorld Australia and news.com.

I also tried submitting an artical on /. yesterday or the day before. My artical got rejected. As my writing skills lack polish I just assumed that it wasn't clear enough for the editors.

sounds like a "legal issue", meaning that the legal teams of the two companies couldn't agree on something - often (always?) legal departments err on the side of being overly cautious - they don't take into account or even comprehend the ubiquity and understood practice of something like linking on the net (in the case of the linking policy). Obviously, for instances going grossly beyond linking, like fraud and misrepresentation, there are time honored legal remedies that outstrip a poorly written "linking policy".

Have you heard about this lawsuit against Radio Free Virgin, from a company that owns streaming patents:

"Acacia Media Technologies, a company owning broad patents that could affect virtually all companies streaming audio or video online, is going to court for the first time to test its claims."

Perhaps they were looking for indemnification from something like that and could reach common ground.

Whatever happens, it's a shame that issues like these remove choice from the average person. Until they removed the QT link, NPR had offered a way to listen to all of their content (not on-demand, but as a "live" stream) in the three major proprietary formats.
Which, while not perfect, is better than what they've got now.
oh well.

The project lead continued to spend the money, in some cases for purposes that were at best dubious and at worst clearly opposed to the wishes of the grant source.

After a great start, they decided to hang out with friends, do their own thing, and drink beer out of their helmets. And then they threw dung at the guys in the suits paying for the party.

Theo's anti-war comments in The Globe and Mail can be found here. Theo wasn't told why funding was pulled but he suspects his comments there did it.

I don't think it was Theo's comments to ZDNet on "security through beer drinking" which can be found here.

The "oil grab" comment does strike me as a bit uninformed and polemic, but I'll leave that debate for another time. As an OpenBSD user, I'm sad to see the funding pulled and not happy that someone in the U.S. gov't is being petty. (Or perhaps they're just paranoid?)

--LP

And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated.

And even if the market for desktop PCs was 'saturated', there would still be a market for operating systems!

The original poster is right--AMD was originally naming the Athlons after muscle cars: Mustang and Thunderbird, obviously, but there was also a "Spitfire" and a "Corvette"--see, for example this article on Cnet. They made a deliberate switch to horses. My impression was that they did this because of copyright/trademark infringement issues. If that's the case, how are "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" going to fare any better--won't they just have to change the name again?

As for the argument that different products can have the same name, I think the hurdle is higher than most people think. For example, in the mid-90's Chevrolet was sued over the "Beretta" moniker by Beretta USA (a handgun manufacturer), and the lawsuit was successful enough that Chevy abandoned the name. Beretta USA argued that Chevy was using the power and speed associated with its Beretta trademark to boost the sales of its cars.

Huh? From my reading of this article, it sounds like the person whose information the RIAA was after had either shared or downloaded songs in violation of their copyright. Verizon's argument seems to revolve around the fact that the songs weren't being hosted on their servers, meaning that the DMCA should be inapplicable as a means of legally requiring the release of subscriber information.

I just don't see anything in the article that implies the RIAA was claiming "P2P always equals Piracy!" They were going after a specific person, and the article quantifies (although does not identify) the songs being shared. That's a far cry from the RIAA suing to find out the identities of anyone who runs KaZaA regardless of how they use it.

In other developments TOHO copyright holders of Godzilla are considering their stance in all the flurry.

You know, this actually almost happened. Doesn't sound like it is going anywhere, though.

This ZDNet story
says that Intel has stopped shipping the 3 Gig P4 with the 800 mhz FSB due
to "anomalies."

It's like deja vu all over again... IBM did it before and no one bought it...

Remember this?

Opera software will probably drop their support for os x due to the Safari browser. A good reason not to use it if ou ask me. Mac Opera Lost On Safari

News.com just updated their article on the chip to state that "a possible problem with the 3GHz Pentium 4, discovered at the last minute, forced the company to delay the chip late on Sunday."

I'm not in the right branch of the thread for this, but here:

Study that shows that Napster users bought more CDs

That thread on the DUC is helpful, thanks.

I was curious about this issue, because Wakko's post above is correct that just to pump the audio data alone should not require much performance. I did some more research, and found that the big reason for the Mac's better performance in this area is the G4 CPU's floating point performance, which has historically been better than Intel's. Heavy floating point calcs are needed when applying effects/filters, so if the problem you're talking about is dropout during playback, this is probably the issue - the CPU can't handle it, it really has little to do with the OS.

This is definitely true for host-based audio processing systems. With Pro Tools, it's not completely clear to me how processing is split between the host CPU and the DSPs. Still, they're clearly using the host CPU heavily.

A PIII 850 like you mentioned would almost certainly be outperformed on floating point by a G4 - there's a table on this page (from 2000) that shows a G4 500 being 2-5 times faster than a PIII-700. Of course, the G4 hasn't quite kept up with in the multi-GHz race, and Athlons are supposed to have good FP performance, so the situation with newer CPUs may be quite different.

You are absolutely correct!

Intel, probably due to the fact they are off on their own world, seems to think SUN is doomed. We all know, however, that it is in fact planets which are doomed. Here's an example to help you out, termos.

And, don't forget:
1. Hold to knowledge that SUN is not doomed
2. ????????????
3. Profit!

Would there be benefits to managing 20 1048 CPU single-OS systems versus 54,000 linux machines?

Some, but they don't outweigh the costs.

A 2 GB 2 CPU box is well under $1000, right? so 32 of those would be, say, $25,000? But the SGI Altix 3700 configured with just 64 processors and 64 GB of RAM costs a cool million dollars.

Even if the multi-box solution demands more fuss to manage (higher failure rates, I'd guess), since you've saved $975,000, you can afford a little admin time. Plus, the cost of somebody who can build intel boxes must be less than half of somebody who is blessed to work on high-end SGI supercomputers. And I'm sure the SGI service and support contract in't cheap, either.

And the nice thing about a distributed approach like this is that if any given box goes down, so what? Whereas if one of your bazillion-dollar 1048-CPU boxes coughs up a hairball, that's a noticeable percentage of your regional computing capacity.

There are some applications where you can't go for this federated approach, but not as many as people think.