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Congrats! You've been quoted in a News.com article. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-955617.html You're an authority on this subject now. ; )

I've been reading about this for years now, but for one reason or another companies have not been able to make this technology work outside the lab. If they could, the potential bandwidth would be measured in the giga or terabit per second, rather than the meager megabits DSL and Cable can provide.

He's some history on this subject as told by the media:
Here's an article from 3.5 years ago claiming, "U.S. Gets Ready For Internet Over Power Lines."
Here's another only 2+ year old suggesting, "Internet access over power lines nears reality."
Another only 1 year old saying,"Internet access via power lines reborn in Europe."

I'll start making plans for it when a get a piece of Junk mail from CP&L (my power company) offering 1 month free access to their new ISP service. Until then I'll remain very sceptical

This article, along with another one that showed up on news.com recently, has me confused. The linked article in particular says AOL Time Warner will be spinning off its cable unit into another company. How does this affect RoadRunner? My RoadRunner is operated by Time Warner Cable, which I suppose will be a part of the "spun off" branch.

link here

Their problems aren't entirely their own fault. Read all about it here

Basically, it seems that congress has been using the patent office as a source of income, draining off millions of dollars that would be spend reviewing applications- seems like a good 15-20% of the fees that companies pay aren't used for reviewing applications at all.

I'm not completely relieving the PO of blame, but it's something to think about anyway.

This issue has come up on slashdot and other places. Here's an earlier article on the same topic in the Guardian The Silicon Valley Toxics coalition has extensive information about the problem. Some congresspeople are also attempting to deal with it. What it comes down to is that old computers are just like other environmental hazzards: the actual cost of goods we buy does not reflect their environmental impact. Gas is cheap these days so it's inexpesnive to drive around in gass guzzling SUVs. But the price of the gas does not reflect the environmental impact of the emissions. Here too, the price of a new computer does not reflect the cost of disposing of it in a safe way. Eventually this will change and there will be an extra $20 charge for computers and similar electronic items that will cover the cost to the government of disposing of the waste when it reaches end of life.

Here , you can read about what may be the largest Opera upgrade ever. They've rewritten close to everything.

First of all, Apple has never strictly enforced the licensing systems they have in place. Nearly all Mac users I've dealt with are lax about it too, usually installing the copy they get with their new computer on their older equipment, or borrowing a copy from a friend.

Uhhh... I think that this applies to all software - not just Apple OSs. This is why the new XP stuff has the online product activation. If Apple followed suit, I don't see how they'd lose any money. The bottom line is that Apple initially planned an OS for x86. Microsoft got scared so they made an "investment" in Apple and then OSX for Intel mysteriously disappears.

OSX on Intel would be extremely profitable for Apple. Unfortunately, I think that Microsoft makes it extremely profitable for Apple's management not to release it.

how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?

1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.

2. apple is a systems company, using the fact that they develop both the hardware and the software as an advantage to them. how many times do you hear the words *it just works* when it comes to apple computers? that's a big selling point for the bulk of the population who don't like to tinker with hardware.

3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.

4. ibm's new power4 desktop chip is further evidence that apple is going to stay ppc. this chip has 160 vector ops (altivec has 162), that's another big indicator.

i can't see apple going x86 in the future.

I'm suprised they didn't link to this article:

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-954651.html

"The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it's benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content"

Chernin, the president of the owner of the Fox corporation, decries the Net's lack of morals. Isn't that delicious?

"The truth is that anyone unwilling to condemn outright theft by digital means is either amoral or wholly self-serving."

Irony meter going off the scale!

Make no mistake about it, this is a culture war with trillions of dollars at stake. It is becoming more and more clear that Hollywood isn't just being greedy, they actively hate and fear the Internet. They would destroy everything we have built rather than adapt to reality.

Excuse me, but the parent post from Shabazz is hardly a troll. He pointed out a massive error on the part of SomeOtherGuy.

SomeOtherGuy has incorrectly read the article and assumed that 'Monte Hurd' is an Opera employee, which is totally incorrect. He then attacks Opera for something they didn't say.

Shabazz's post is insightful.
SomeOtherGuy's post is overrated.

Please moderate as such.

Excuse me, but the parent post from Shabazz is hardly a troll. He pointed out a massive error on the part of SomeOtherGuy.

SomeOtherGuy has incorrectly read the article and assumed that 'Monte Hurd' is an Opera employee, which is totally incorrect. He then attacks Opera for something they didn't say.

Shabazz's post is insightful.
SomeOtherGuy's post is overrated.

Please moderate as such.

"But ultimately, [Monte] Hurd [with Starphire Technologies] concluded, Opera and other Microsoft competitors would do better to support the technologies that the market-leading Internet Explorer browser made available, rather than focusing on industry standards.

"What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."

Damn fine until you realize you can't block popups or have tabs.

Download.com gives this list of popup killers for IE. Seems like you can block popups quite easily.

Tabs is a little harder, but you might like to try BroadPage.

See, it wasn't that hard?

Damn fine until you realize you can't block popups or have tabs.

Download.com gives this list of popup killers for IE. Seems like you can block popups quite easily.

Tabs is a little harder, but you might like to try BroadPage.

See, it wasn't that hard?

Not that political action won't help too, but it's easier to get a law defeated or repealed if it doesn't work anyway.

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
  
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
  
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.
  

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!
  

It's not just fair use rights dealing with movies or music. Schools are now expiring books and other materials at the end of your higher education training.

And slashdot just had a story on shrinkwrapped licenses for books that prohibited the spread of the information contained therein, and had to be returned if contracts ended, etc.

And the copyright crowd has no problem equating librarians with Waco terrorists for wanting to make books available for free: "They've got their radical factions, like the Ruby Ridge or Waco types," who want to share all content for free, said Judith Platt, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers.
Source:

Someone else linked to this article about the NSA tapping fiber. In it, they talked to the people who lay fiber, and they say it's not unheard of for a fishing ship to drop ancor at exactly the wrong spot and cut the line.

So, the question now is how many of those accidents were really accidents? A fishing ship inadvertently cuts the line, a sub a few thousand miles further down splices into the fiber before they can fix it. The fiber's offline anyway, so no one notices. When they come back online, they'll notice some slight signal degradation, but they'll blame it on their own repair job.

Of course I always thought that fiber was always pretty secure anyway since it's a lot harder to tap than copper

Boy did you think wrong. The USS Jimmy Carter is being retrofitted just for the purpose of tapping fiber optic cable.

They have an article about this which mentions that the three certified versions are Red Hat 7.3, SuSE 8.0 Professional, and Mandrake ProSuite 8.2.

There are quite a few people getting far too uppity about this. And while it is a goal worth taking political action over, I think one of the core problems with the Open Source movement is the fact that we don't know when to back down. Our collective character wants to resolve the problem, crush the "evil bad guys" (Microsoft and proprietary giants) and save the future of computing for people everywhere - seriously, it's our mindset. We grew up watching star wars and star trek, right? As a movement we've been overcome by the blindness and fervor that we decry in the corporations and government we struggle against.

If we truly want freedom, we should be fighting for the freedom to choose - the freedom to pick the best tool for the job. The freedom to use open source if it is better, or to pick proprietary software if it's the best tool for the job. Passing bills mandating the use of open source in the government takes away the freedom of the government to do its job as efficiently as possible. We're taking away from their freedom. Using the exact same method that the MPAA, RIAA, and other corporate entities make use of things like the DMCA to impact our own freedom. And what's the point of inflicting one "freedom" on the government just to take away another?

That should help with the U.S. government not being able to keep ahold of their laptops.

http://news.com.com/2100-1020-950155.html

Perhaps this is why the speculation about moving to the Intel-ish platform. As long as they do their usual good job with integration, it's a good idea.
It's a shame, though, that they didn't use plain sdram and make the system cheaper... unless, there's something in the works for a plug-in replacement cpu supporting faster memory througput?

Turnout was on the low end of the 20 to 100 people Tiemann expected. Some programmers complained of the early 10:30 a.m. start time. One said he had to drag his friend out of bed. Others cited the fast clip of the gangly Tiemann, who took off promptly from the conference hall and rushed up the street, forcing some programmers to jog breathlessly behind him.

Sooo... I think it's gonna be a while before we see a followup story on this, or at least it won't be on the main page.

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems began selling its first general-purpose Linux servers this week, but Bill Joy, Sun's chief scientist and a pioneer in designing Unix, has voiced doubts about Linux's open-source underpinnings.

Contrast that press release with this recent statement by Bill Joy:

Joy said the SCSL, which he helped develop to cover Java and several
other Sun software technologies, "fixed the flaws in the open-source
licensing" by providing a better foundation for profiting off the
software. The SCSL permits others to see and modify source code,
but gives Sun the authority to accept or reject those changes. Sun
also has the authority to charge royalties to companies shipping
products using the software.

Because only the poor can be criminals.

That's insightful?

Actually, I think that comment is well grounded in recent evnets. Exampl:, a recently proposed law would let media companies break into computers which are believed to be involved in trading copyrighted materials.

Compare that to the way HP treated some white-hat hackers who tried to get them to fix an old HP-UX vulnerability.

What does this tell us? Wealthy corporate hacker = good, average joe white hat = bad. I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing the poster was getting at.

Linux users march on city hall

So it appears this crazy cause to make software "free as in required by law" is not even popular among the open source faithful. Chalk one up for common sense!

--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org

I bet Verizon would like to get this guy to design the furniture for their offices to put the $22,000 workstations on!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
  
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
  
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.
  

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!
  

A good example of that would be Divx (not the MPEG-4 codec), a DRM encrusted standard that was trashed by consumers.

you will want to read these results

As in this article on CNET, "The open-source business model hasn't worked very well,"

http://msn-cnet.com.com/2100-1001-949812.html?type =pt&part=msn&tag=cdf&form=base&subj=cn _fd

Earlier notes on their website indicated that it would be Java based, which would imply the ability to take advantage of all sorts of 3rd party solutions.

New wording on their site:
Danger has developed its own virtual machine operating environment. Applications written for the Hiptop platform can be developed using industry standard development tools such as Metrowerks CodeWarrior-J(TM) and Microsoft Visual J++(TM), and then automatically converted to execute in Danger's lightweight and optimized environment.

And a reference Java in this interview.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-948497.html

Ali

Time to "Reduce Windows to a set of poorly written device drivers"

According to this (news.com story - not "com.com") it is going to be hard to ignore them.

I'm so confused... who's right?

I hate flash so I can't view their demo.

Okay, I'll scare the hell out of you.

St. Petersburg Times

ZDNet

So...

Yeah. I think that bad fathers will be bad fathers. If it wasn't EQ, it probably would have been *actual* heroin.

The kid who committed suicide is true too, according to Wired.

Re: Geek Activism

I was moved to reply to your recent article on Geek Activism on CNET due to what I consider to be the dangerous political naivety of the piece. Advocating that people should step back from challenging the political and legal system in favour of computer programming is the most ignorant and ineffectual suggestion I can possibly imagine. Allowing the decisions of others to be made without debate or contestation in a political arena results in poor decisions being made, unrepresentative political systems and at worst the danger of a minority imposing their views on the rest of us. Do you really believe that people programming at computer keyboards can change the world? That is the simplistic utopian belief that technology can somehow free us without recourse to the political system. I would suggest you look carefully at the recent case of the prosecution of the Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen for his role in creating DeCSS software (and under the pressure of the US government no less), see digitalagora.com for more info.

Black Civil Rights activists, the Women's movement, Anti-war protesters, and even geeks have to actually get up (and well away from the computer keyboard) to force change and fight for a more equitable political system. I agree that email on its own may be ineffectual, but creating lobbying websites, educating people and writing to political leaders, lobbying companies, newspapers and magazines all contribute to a debate that can have profound effect on the decisions of politicians.

The ability of individuals to obtain and read facts free from licenses, coercive copyright restrictions, corporate censorship (maintained by the use of copyright law) and other attempts to control information, reduces people's ability to obtain information and make up their own mind. The space where people can read and communicate with others, which includes the Internet but is not limited to it, is a public sphere, a space of public deliberation, it is vital to the maintenance of a modern democratic state and this is being slowly eroded.

We should be encouraging people to take part in this political debate to set policy with regard to technology and fight to widen access to information and indeed to technology itself.

Regards

David Berry david@locarecords.com

Home Page

It's important to keep writing the software that forces changes in the culture. But it's equally vital to educate people about those changes, to help ensure that the changes that come are positive. McCullagh's argument reads far too much like "Gee, this politics thing is hard. Let's go back to coding and pizza. I'm sure it will all work out" (or, for the more cynical, "Nothing I do will matter anyway.")

If these issues matter to you, then get out there and educate the less tech-savvy. That includes Congresscritters. It also includes family members, coworkers, etc. Don't surrender just because it looks hard. Or to put it another way: Yes, geeks organizing politically might fail to stop this headlong rush into technological totalitatianism. Even if we speak up, the worst might happen. But if we don't speak up, then the worst is guaranteed to happen.

I applaud people creating the disruptive technologies, but they aren't enough. It's interesting to offer up Shawn Fanning (Napster) as a shining example. How, exactly, is Napster doing right now? Yes, he helped usher in an era of peer-to-peer filesharing (ironically through the failure of the Napster model). But now we face increasingly aggressive legal attempts to legislate away computer security, privacy, and fair use rights to counter the things he's unleashed. Maybe unleashing it needed to be done -- but don't you think that maybe, just maybe, things would be in a better state if someone had clearly and forcefully articulated why these things are good, instead of leaving the field uncontested, to be defined by the PR flacks of the *AA groups?

The DMCA passed unamiously because the geeks were silent, by and large. Congresscritters had no white hats telling them what was at stake; and there wasn't even a nascent organized lobbying effort. And of course Rep. Coble would say the law is "performing the way we hoped." -- he helped write and pass the thing! Why not a quote from, say, Rep. Boucher:

But in the end, Congress agreed to a fundamentally flawed bill... To counter this emerging threat to traditionally accepted fair-use values, Congress must rewrite the law.

The big lobbiess don't win because Senator Bob votes against his constituents and ignores their please. The big lobbies win because no one else is speaking .

So go ahead. Code the next generation of encryption software. Write the next secure anonymous emailer. Protect privacy at the router level. But, while you saving the world in codepsace, take a minute or two to write your senator or explain to your mom what's going wrong, why we're on the wrong track.

Only a multi-pronged approach holds any chance of success.

A news.com article discusses two separate new flaws found in Flash Player. One allows malicious code to be run on Windows/Unix OSes. The other allows an attacker to read files on a person's local hard drive. For the first flaw, All Windows and Unix versions of Flash Player before 6,0,40,0, are affected. Any application capable of reading SWF files (email, instant messenger, browser) can be used. For the second, it relies on the XML functionality of Flash Player 6 and tricks the browser into reading local files.

I wonder how secure .net will turn out to be then ?

You can get the 14-day demo of gobeProductive here. (Windows version.)

Here is a link to a CNET article that describes a new spec, including 4x recording speeds, and a new 8cm disc.

I wouldn't be surprised if California's free-software -in-government bill actually passes. It was probably spawned because of that $95 million dollar mess they had with Oracle.

See http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-835267.html.