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There you have it..no more difficult than the old way of recording mp3s. Now, remind me again what this technology was supposed to accomplish, other than breaking CD drives, and voiding the warranty on Apple computers?

It bothers me that a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship. StarOffice is this.

Bull. Sun bought StarOffice from the German company StarDivision, improved it, gave it as a gift to the community and in return bases its future StarOffice version on the OO code. Sounds like fair deal to me. Java is another matter, but then, they wrote it and it's theirs and they can do whatever they want with it.

Doesn't scale? I guess someone had better tell Yahoo.

jason

AT&T is switching to GSM. Cingular is switching to GSM. Verizon is considering switching to GSM, and probably will when they start rolling out 3G. The only company in America sticking with CDMA is Sprint PCS, and we all know how much they suck.

Seems to me that Qualcomm is becoming irrelevant, and is seeking a cash injection from the taxpayer via good old American back-room deals.

Having experienced the quality of CDMA and Sprint PCS, my main feeling is: haven't the poor Iraqis suffered enough?

Then again, Al Qaeda was reported to be using cellphones... Maybe someone thinks Iraq and Al Qaeda really are working together, and they're hoping that by giving Iraq a useless cellphone system they'll throw a spanner in the works.

you should open your google before you troll next time.

Read this for example.

1. The purpose of government is not to govern efficiently. It's to govern well. These are not the same thing.
I did not phrase that very well. Of course the purpose of government is not to govern efficiently (meaning governing with little work or waste), but to govern well resulting in a system that works efficiently (meaning little loss due to red tape, idleness, or civil unrest). I maintain that following personal self interest in a leadership position interferes with the ability govern well.

2. Leaders will pursue their own self interests. It is not possible for it to be otherwise.
Again, I find that acceptance of that assertion frightening.

I agree that a system that assumes its leaders will act for the common good against their own interests would be doomed to fail. Such an assumption would elicit neither checks nor balances and would most likely result in a dictatorship.

However, that fact, and the fact that we do have checks and balances, is not an excuse to abuse a leadership position to pursue self-interest.

When you are in a leadership position, you have a certain responsibility to subsume your own welfare in favor of the welfare of those you are leading. While it might be difficult to create laws that force our leaders to do this, we should still hold our leaders to those standards and chastise them when they abuse their power.

While I feel strongly about this on a moral level in regards our public servants, I feel less strongly in respect to our business leaders. In a private company, you should be perfectly free to screw over your employees and customers if you feel it is in your best interest (note that this is in a private company -- not one that is publicly traded). However, I am pretty sure that this type of behavior does not promote the growth of a company.

I have known of at least two companies under 30 people where the owners drew very large salaries with respect to the size of the company. Neither of these companies continued to grow and one of them has shrunk quite a bit.

On the other hand, Bill Gates has drawn a much smaller salary than the CEO's of similarly sized companies. The money saved on his salary was probably used to hire more employees, or perhaps to motivate and retain existing employees, and Mr. Gates has benefited greatly from this sacrifice. One could argue that he did this out of self interest, but there was no way for him to know that taking a fraction of the 'appropriate' salary for running a company that size would pay off so well. I find it more likely that Mr. Gates understands the responsibilities of leadership and that meeting those responsibilities has improved the conditions of the system he governs.

this reminds me of a prior attempt by the real networks to provide a game subscription service named RealOneArcade. i don't think the service became all that popular, though - unfortunately, it seems they didn't offer much aside from arcade and puzzle games, and there's only so much demand for those.

but in general, the subscription model can be amazingly profitable. even if games-on-demand bring only a fraction of the incredible revenue from on-line games, it's still a lot of money. not to mention they do a good deed of breathing new life into old games. :)

The sony blue-ray drive actually goes on sale in Japan on April 10. (See bluray.com) I totally agree with you - first working prototype? Give me a break!

hmmm... apparently here are pictures of prototypes by sony, jvc, panasonic, philips, pioneer, samsung, sharp, and zenith. :)

Cnet had an article on this as well on March 3. Sony has been showing prototypes since last October.

archive.nytimes link... or the same article on com.com.com.com

Well, it's certainly possible through a combination of tourament wins and sponsorship but he wouldn't be earning it online. Unless, of course, he was playing solitaire.

or read from other sources.

C'mon! Remember Dick Tracy? The ORIGINAL wristwatch (vid)phones?? Magnetic Hovercars?? Sam Ketcham?

NO?!?

How 'bout the later-model Beatty/Pacino/Madonna movie, does THAT ring any bells?

ZD even led with a Tracy reference when it reported this same story

Jeez, yet another reason for SlashDot to institute age filters; I guess it would be pointless for me to make a joke about "Opening Channel 'D'" ...

The linked CNET article has a bit of a misleading title.
The title and by-line states: "Bush order covers Internet secrets" and "President Bush has signed an executive order that explicitly gives the government the power to classify information about critical infrastructures such as the Internet."

But the last paragraph states:
"Steven Aftergood, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists who tracks government secrecy, says the change in definitions "creates an opening that could be exploited in the future, but in practice the previous policy would have permitted much of the same thing."

Meaning that the previous act (signed into law by President Clinton in '95) would have allowed the same thing as President Bush's re-do of the act.

Unfortunately, most people won't read the entire article to see what the real information is.

/. with "Fair and Balanced" reporting. Read the The Guardian for the Right and The New Zealand Herald for the Left. Read it at C|Net if you don't care.
Don't worry if you forget a secret Echelon knows it already.

It's interesting to note that the OSNews article does not mention the major technical change in Redhat 9 (which merits the new major revision number imho). Redhat 9 includes NPTL, a new threading system which will improve some server and desktop tasks. The article on CNET has more info.

An answer to spam's discontent?

By Charles Cooper March 24, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

Phillip Goldman is either another rich guy with a death wish or a man on the verge of etching his name into tech history.

All that has to be music to Goldman's ears, because his new company, Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks, claims it can provide 100 percent protection against unsolicited junk e-mail. For long-suffering Web surfers, that would be the holy grail, the Super Bowl and the World Cup all wrapped into one.

Yeah by clicking on that submit button you agree that you solicit email, ie it's 100% solicited email by definition in the TOS...

But I'm sure that the same people who sign up with the Nigerians will fall for this one.

Well, Microsoft has already committed to Opteron...therefore the rest of your argument is a straw man. :^)

By the way, Miguel, (having just noticed who I'm replying to) I still think your adoption of .Net/C# over Java was a horrible decision. You could be using the increasingly stable and useful gcj instead.

I wonder how long it'll be until Mono is tied up in patent/copyright lawsuits...

In fact, this is one of the very worst examples I have ever seen! Even worse is that the idiot spams forums like OSNews with ads for his crap.

Oh, and if I ever see another VB Image Viewer that the author thinks warrents a $35 price then I swear I'll go postal. I'll do it, I really will.

If you want to know more about the Serial ATA technology:

Cnet

SATA and ISCSI

Intel Dev Paper

Maxtor White Paper

Serial ATA Working Group

Other than a convenient way to gather multiple tracks together, to prevent these guys from doing this kind of stuff.

Yep, little old Winzip is the Sharpie for this expensive DRM.

It seems like the patent pursuit is stemming from failed or failing companies or tiny companies looking to blow up overnight but this article points out that HP is getting into the business. Hmm, has HP's stock tanked?

I'd agree, but considering the fact that improvements on the single-button mouse include the round mouse, sometimes ya just have to wonder..

S3 = Sonicblue. They changed their name 4 years ago to better reflect their change in focus. news.com.com

As usual, News.com trolls Slashdot for interesting comments... You've just been quoted at the end of the article. :)

Doesn't look to me like TiVo needs a savior.

-B

http://rss.com.com/2100-1023-980492.html

Still LOL.

Oh yeah? LOL.

2) Flash? it's solid state, and no moving parts, but the write speed SUCKS for real data sizes. Also, the density just isn't there. IIRC flash cards top out at 512 mb now.

While I won't argue about write speed, Flash in cf format is becoming available in capacities of 4 Gig, see story at C|Net. Doing ide raid with this would cover much of the speed barrier by distributing writes across many cards. It would also increase capacity.

How much data is going to be captured anyway. If it is a stream of values for several sensors sampled at 8khz, is doubtful to exceed the write speed of the current types of flash.

At the same time we are looking at hardware that is decades old....

-Rusty

Russ Cooper, moderator of the NTBugTraq security list, which is owned by security services firm TruSecure, agreed that attack wasn't a serious one

Deepest Apologies...

Coverage at CNET indicates that the W3C may be softening it's Royalty-Free Standard Licensing stance. Please read Adam Warner's W3C Patent policy page on why RAND is not an option for Open Standard Licensing and email your comments to the W3C Patent Policy mailing list!

Apple? Customer friendly? How can a company that invoked the DMCA against its customers be considered customer-friendly in any sense of the word?

"Apple didnt pick us for their browser! waah"

Er... the only people I heard whining when Safari came out were the Opera team.

Gerv
(document author)

Where the heck does HP get this figure from?

ISTR HP snagged a huge Linux deal at Dreamworks last year. And they also scored a big Linux deal at Disney.

The entertainment industry (especially the movie industry) are ironically moving to Linux big-time. The visual effects industry essentially told all their tools suppliers to port to Linux or else. The tools vendors have complied. Expect to see tasks that were traditionally done on SGI or Sun machines to be done pretty much exclusively on Linux machines from now on.

James Cameron pretty much set the tone for Linux in Hollywood with the renderfarm he used for Titanic. That farm was built with Digital Alpha processors, but instead of buying DEC Unix (or Tru64 or whatever it was called then), his effects guys put Linux on the machines and saved a couple of hundred grand.

I find it endlessly amusing that Hollywood is so staunchly in support of intellectual property rights, but is more than willing to enjoy the benefits of Linux.

No big surprise, CNet is reporting that Amazon will not honor price: http://news.com.com/2100-1019-993246.html

The company said that its terms of use strictly state that no contract for sale has been formed until customers receive an e-mail stating that their order has shipped, meaning it has no obligation to hand out Hewlett-Packard iPaqs at rock-bottom prices. "We will be canceling orders made for the HP iPaq Pocket PCs at the incorrect price this morning," the company said in a statement.

http://news.com.com/2100-1019-993246.htm

I'm surprised that slashdot posted about the CNET article about the end of the original iMac instead of new clustering Xserve. I mean think about it. Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of...oh nevermind.

The conclusion is the structure of cable monopolies is preventing rapid adoption.

Hmm... That's just fucking bizzare.... especially since Comcast and Cox (2 of the top cable companies... especially since Comcast now owns AT&T) are all Tivo investors.

Why is a security bug in the MS webserver news but a similar bug in the Sun webserver is not?

Oh wait, this is Slashdot and Bill Gates is evil...

Hole found in Sun server software
A flaw in Sun Microsystems' Web server software could allow hackers to gain control of Web sites, a security consulting company warned.

Does it include platform-agnostic developers (ie. Java/ perl/ ASP/ PHP/ .NET)?

Not only would it further Lindows' pursuit of capturing the Linux end-user desktop market, it would also be yet another opportunity for him to get Lindows in the news. MS is already suing the company over their us of the name "Lindows"; this would allow him to pool resources with the XPde team and possibly really win big (not just the use of the word, but also the look & feel).

Of course, we'd also have to put up with another article with his mugshot in it. Why does he always do that?

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolog y/maney/2003-02-25-maney_x.htm

I like to listen to mp3's and watch SVCD's in my SUV while I am high.

I can say with a large degree of certainty that you are a complete moron.

Windows does run on IA64, and it does very well, thank you.

If you dont think AMD consulted MSFT with every step of the design process, you're nuts.

If MSFT wasnt going to support Hammer, they wouldnt have developed it.

The company names their flagship CPU line "Athlon XP" and you dont think they have very close ties inside Microsoft?

heres a link for you anyways From april of 2002. I'll even read the opening line for you.

"AMD confirmed Wednesday that it will collaborate with Microsoft to tune Windows to run on its upcoming family of Hammer chips. "

A google of "microsoft" and "hammer" should get more hits.

In an article posted here AMD announces its new naming scheme for the Opteron family of processors. With their new model number scheme, they continue to fight the association of frequency with performance. The model numbers are new, but not the fight.

Read it again:

"however, you must acquire and dedicate a license for each separate COMPUTER on or from which the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is installed, used, accessed, displayed or run."

Pretty crafty, those MS lawyers. I hope the EULA gets its ass kicked in the CA lawsuit.

That 1 watt number is crap- thats the minimum power consumption, which isn't really a useful number. According to Cnet, the maximum is 25 watts, and AMD is still working on a chip that only uses 15 watts.

Declan McCullagh suggested these four voluntary guidelines to deal with the privacy threat:

First, consumers should be notified--a notice on a checkout receipt would work--when RFID tags are present in what they're buying. Second, RFID tags should be disabled by default at the checkout counter. Third, RFID tags should be placed on the product's packaging instead of on the product when possible. Fourth, RFID tags should be readily visible and easily removable.

I like this idea, only it won't work without legislation. Somebody please convince the EU commission...

Oh yeah, Declans article was linked by slashdot.

Tim

See here. The evildoers were Brilliant Digital Entertainment.

This time around its Honest Theif.

When will the naming of companies with oxymorons end?!

Here is a similar story on CNet.

And, for more on the "cell" technology, check out this Red Herring article from last summer, and this Inquirier.net article that includes a picture from the USPT office.

Given all that, I'd still be surprised if this was in US stores in time for XMas. I just don't think they'll have enough time to hype it sufficiently. On the other hand, if the tech is really almost done, do they want to wait until XMas 2004? Hrm....