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The only threat here is if the Office files themselves (and things you want to do on the Internet, etc.) require Palladium. But that would lock out more than just Linux users, it would lock out anyone without a Palladium PC, Palladium Windows, and Palladium application(s). So for Palladium to effectively kill open source in general and Linux in particular it will have to become so ubiquitous that everyone needs it even more than they today need Office or IE compatibility. And that will not happen until everyone who is currently happy with their PC, OS, and applications find a good reason to replace them all with Palladium versions, and that won't happen untill Palladium becomes ubiquitous enough to effectively require it, etc. It's a classic chicken-egg problem, and I fail to see the Killer App that's going to make everyone throw away perfectly good computers and upgrade to Palladium systems. It's either everyone upgrades overnight or it fails to take hold.

Even if every new PC sold from now on is Palladium-compliant, what do you do about the installed base? What Killer App makes them all upgrade? If my bank requires Palladium, I'll switch banks; enough folks do that and the remaining banks won't switch to Palladium. If all new CDs require Palladium, the most they can expect of me is that I'll buy a DRM-compliant CD player and use the analog output to "pirate" the music for my car and computers. Lots of people forget that today's cheap analog is far better than the best you could buy at any price 20 years ago; if you don't have super-d-duper amps and speakers you won't notice the difference; you certainly won't notice it in your car at 60 MPH. Hell, most MP3's introduce more distortion in their compression than you'd get taping the analog outputs! Don't fear analog, folks.

So unless you can show me the Killer App, I predict Palladium is as dead as Digital Video Express (Divx, not DivX).

Read this story from Zdnet: News: Microsoft: Palladium not just for Windows

This is completely contradictory to what the UDRP has done for Hong Kong-based company "Ultimate Search, Inc."

Case 1: Poetry site.
Case 2: PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Case 3: WBW
Case 4: Home of the Underdogs.

And you'd better believe there are lots more cases in which these cybersquatters have taken over sites without retribution.

Here on cnn and on cnet
-1:offtopic :p

The UDRP has no built-in appeal process. One go-round is all you get. On the other hand, Paragraph 4, Section K says the UDRP doesn't negate your rights to use regular courts. That's pretty much just stating the obvious: ICANN isn't really a government, you know.

In that ICANN lacks an army or a police force of its own, national governments have a fair amount of authority. While they can't neccessarily make ICANN do what they want, they can exert legal control over registrants, registrars, and registries within their jurisdictions.

So the Egyptian government would have potential authority about any case involving an Egyptian resident (as complainant or respondent), and a lot of control over the .eg top-level domain. (Worth noting: Most of the ccTLDs aren't using ICANN rules for domain disputes yet. ICANN is trying to get everyone on board with the UDRP, which many ccTLD operators see as an American powerplay.)

In the United States, the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act lays out the laws about domain disputes, and can be used to challenge UDRP decisions in court. Since the com, net, org, and biz registries are US-based, U.S. courts are now the main venue of appeal for UDRP decisions.

One minute the W3C are complaining about people who don't stick to their standards, and the next they're stating that using the standards might cost you money. Its madness.

The web was built on open and unrestricted standards, yet the people in charge seem keen to bow to pressure from a few special interest groups (and does anyone believe the proposers of this licensing aren't massive corporations with deep pockets) and cut off the thing that made it grow in the first place. I despair, sometimes.

CNET has a story on the 17inchers too.

C|Net has an article that almost mirrors what ThinkSecret is saying. Personally, I'm happy with my PowerBook, so if the big news is getting 10.2 on August 5, I'll be happy.

Since CNET is also running this story, shouldn't they now be considered a "rumors site" and have their press pass revoked from Macworld? Additionally, why is this news? Why not at least wait until after the product is announced? Is a 17" screen even worth mentioning? Or is it just something that's been submitted 10 billion times and is only being posted to make the deluge stop?

Their perspective here.

Don't joke, Gene Kan, well known for his work on Gnutella died on Jun 29 at the age of 25, check
the news.com story

CNet's Tech News has an image next to the story's headline of a crown, perched over two Mac OS-style windows...

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/pg/070802browserkin g2 .jpg

-mj

There's a coupla things:

The autodetect feature asks you to name each plugin (this is a little tough if you don't know which plugin goes with which browser!). In general, IE ises the .ocx file and everything else (Mozilla, opera, NN) seem to use the one in the Netscape folder (Mozilla will if it's already there).

If you're using IE, you can't turn flash OFF if the browser is on (it runs as a service or something), but you can do the opposite: keep it turned off and only turn it on if you have to (or want to?).

you can grab it at cnet or from my homepage. Any feedback is appreciated.

Does the following story qualify as speculation and rumour.

From the article (I made the link a bit more obvious):

IE is used by more than 85 percent of all Web surfers by many counts, and may go even higher. One recent study showed it with 95 percent share.

The referenced study actually reported 95.3% use of MSIE, down from 96.6% as reported the month before. I don't care if it's true, the audience of users to whom I serve web documents is far more diverse. I believe it would be foolish to permit numbers of overwhelming IE dominance sway you into the IE-centric camp of Web design.

Here are my overall use percentages. In cases such as those which feed the numbers below, I don't really have much choice but to be agnostic about the browser in use. Percentage of documents (HTML only) viewed by various browsers, top ten:

• 60.13% MSIE (order: 5.x, 6.x, 4.x, 3.x)
• 9.37% Netscape (order: 4.x, 6.x, 3.x, 7.x)
• 8.56% Opera (order: 6.x, 5.x, 4.x, 3.x)
• 7.14% Mozilla (order: 0.x.x, 1.x.x)
• 5.43% Identified Robots [!!!]
• 2.57% Konqueror (order: 2.x, 3.x, 1.x)
• 2.04% Galeon (order: 1.x, 0.x)
• 1.40% AOL (order: 7.x, 6.x, 5.x, 4.x)
• 1.05% Mac MSIE (order: 5.x, 4.x)
• 0.66% Lynx

I really won't go into reasons why I've split AOL or Mac IE from Win IE ... I could rejoin them or group all the Gecko-based browsers together, but the above provides me with a pretty clear indication of why I shouldn't care whether 95% of those not visiting my sites are using IE exclusively. Would I really want to forfeit over 1/3 of my visitors' experiences? Would you?

Numbers are great. Context is better.

Pretty soon AOL is going to be using gecko for its HTML renderer.

In short order, developers taking this tack loose about 30 million customers. Do you want to be the one to explain to your boss why the company site doesn't work on his wife's computer?

Intel's cost to make a P4 is around $21. So, to make a Celeron, it might be less and if MS buys a ton of them, they could get them for pretty cheap.

Theworm is thought tobe capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few home users have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

Sometimes it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I consider myself to be one of the pioneers of news aggregation and linking -- having done this on a number of my own sites since 1995.

Back in 1998 I came into conflict with the Nando Times when my 7am.com news site over the use of their headlines and links on the syndicated Java news ticker and news-aggregation pages.

Nando tried to claim that use of its headlines and links to its pages were a breach of copyright and that anyone wishing to do this would have to pay $100/month for
the privilege.

I told them to go take a hike and they threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Suffice to say that once they checked with their legal department as to the validity of their claims they decided to back down.

Although they were one of the first news sites on the Web, Nando simply didn't get the concept that links drive traffic and traffic generates ad revenues -- or at least it did when there were advertisers willing to pay for placements.

The stupid thing about this whole situation was that the 7am.com News Ticker became so popular and drove so much traffic to the various sites included on it that if I decided to remove the links to a particular news site I'd often get an email complaining that I *wasn't* linking.

Around the same time I had similar problems with my Aardvark site and found myself battling a long list of local news publishers who threatened legal action if I continued to deep link to the stories they were carrying.

As with Nando, these sites eventually worked out that traffic = revenues and withdrew their stupid threats.

I should make it clear that I have a very ethical and honest linking policy which I advertise on my sites so that both the linkers and linkees know what I expect and offer. It's a shame that more sites don't do the same so as to avoid confusion and conflict.

I've been deep linking for some seven years, been threatened with law suits over my linking activities by much bigger publishers on no less than six occasions -- but never had to spend a day in court and never backed down.

Some people just take longer to learn that the WWW is *made* from deep links and that to disallow them will effectively destroy the fabric of the web.

That's too bad. My shareware keyboard macro program, mgSimply, allows you to use the Windows key as a modifier key. The benefit is the key significantly increases the number of keyboard macros you can have.

If you use Windows XP,NT, or 2000, you'll need this patch.

So, what if their searches turn up spoofing by the RIAA themselves? Will they take themselves to court?

As requested, here is a single source.

Most of the anti-library rhetoric coming out last year originated from Judy Platt, spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers.

• MtAlHEAd1
• ILUVMYCAT
• pr0nLover3523
• etc.

Uh, did you even read my links? Specifically this one. UltimateTV has been shuffled off into the darkness since TiVo received its patents. So - where have you been?

> Microsoft has already have a TiVo like system, it's called the Ultimate TV.

No, it's called, third place in a one horse race.

Although that's what RenderMorphics was before they bought it renamed it Direct3D, and started giving it away for nothing. here

[I worked at Argonaut during all this, although I never met Rich, IIRC his office was stateside]

• The EU still has a pending monopoly investigation on MS
• Some EU institutions may not appreciate Palladium. For instance: would you trust Microsoft with the security of your armed forces if you were, say, the Swedish (neutral country) governement?

One of the Nigerian spams (Give us your bank details so we can put these millions there for safe keeping, etc...) turned up here once.
If you get those, you are supposed to report them to the police, and your local law enforcement or embassy may be able to help. In London, the Metropolitan police have a web page about it, so we sent the mail and original headers to them.
Apparently, six people were recently arrested for this very crime! So things that are obviously major frauds are worth looking up in case you can shop them to the law!

I'm not quite sure how MS plan's on evading the patent issue. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the PVR industry is laden with patents like a minefield. Both TiVo and ReplayTV hold a number of them on PVR technology. Unless these companies plan on surviving on license fees like a tick on Microsoft's neck, it seems to me like Microsoft is going to have quite a wait (about 15 years) before it can get into the PVR biz.

the big hurdle holding many companies back from upgrading to .NET is the cost of porting all of the legacy Java code to the new application framework.

This is the hurdle for any "upgrade" to .Net, as described by Gartner here.

Now that Sun is being given some real competition in the virtual machine market, maybe we'll see some genuine innovation.

Since when has Microsoft ever competed on merits? The only innovation we'll see out of Redmond are the new and exciting ways to break laws and get lawyers to clean up the mess afterwards.

You could setup a virtual VPN. That'd allow you to play a LAN game with friends anywhere. The program I've linked you to is a 30 day trial, $80 to reg, but I'm sure you could *cough*crack it*cough*. There might also be similar software for free / cheaper, do a google search.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few home users have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few home users have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few home users have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few home users have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide.

According to this link at news.com Executive Mark Surfas said the virus infected one of their download servers for two hours on Tuesday and five hours Wednesday night, while they were performing routine service.

Surfas said a total of 3,100 infected files were served, and the company is in the process of notifying everyone who got an infected file and pointing them to free antivirus tools that will disinfect their systems.


Not cool...

The Cynical Hedgehog spake:
They forced Bell to open their networks to CLECs. This isn't all that different

...And jerdenn argued:
Actually, that statement is only partially correct. The FCC decision you are speaking of has been reversed in a recent court decision, and is expected to be brought more So, while the FCC did force the baby bells to "open" the networks to the CLECs, you'll be seeing them closed back up again soon.

-jerdenn

We, as the informed users, need to get the word out. The cable companies are doing a great job convincing the policy makers that there really is competion.

The article states that the winner will face IBM's Power4 64-bit RISC CPU.

Does anyone know how fast their clock speed is???

A: We have a constant problem with people who are trying to break our system for no other purpose than they have nothing better to do--like their bosses haven't assigned them enough to do at work today, or that their mom hasn't made them mow the lawn, in most cases!

so it seems plausible that we're vulnerable, though I'm not sure.

However, this note indicates that 3.3p1 (and presumable now 3.4) compiles fine, including the privilege-separation option, without problems.

In the announcement of the bill, Berman cited some of the tools that would be protected by the legislation, and which copyright owners have expressed some interested in using.

These tactics include:

interdiction, in which a copyright owner floods a file swapper with false requests so that downloads can't get through;

redirection, in which a file swapper might be pointed to a site that doesn't actually have the files they're looking for;

and spoofing, in which a corrupt or otherwise undesirable file masquerades as a song, movie or other file that people are seeking.

See, thats the thing. We assume that this was done to enrich executives. This is not probably true.

For instance, earlier this year there was the discovery of massive sales commission fraud at WCOM, done by salespeople.

A friend of mine was interviewing at WCOM for a sales position in February. The people there were saying "Sure, base is only $40k, but we make up to $150k with commission..." On his second interview, the people who were going to hire him were gone.

"(I) wouldn't want to let a particularly incensed copyright owner introduce a virus that would disable the computer from which copyrighted works are made available ... "

Gee that's sweet of him, but would a law like this permit the RIAA or someone else to write a legal virus that contains its own Gnutella or Morpheous client and offer bogus files (1) to clog up the system, and (2) spread itself?

This would arguably be a kind of legal distributed file-spoofing on a massive scale without technically "disabling" any of the infected machines.

Or, if a virus is too unpalatable, this law might let the RIAA sneak Kazaa file-jamming software into the "bonus" software they include on CDs.

Either way, it would be kind of ironic if the RIAA used distributed methods to attack Kazaa, considering Kazaa built a secret virtual network within their own client.

W

This kind of question really requires Professional Legal Advice and may depend on the context, e.g. is he reimplementing something trivial like a command line argument parser or something non-trivial like highly optimized kernel code for a specific device? Anywhere as for my opinion, I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL) but the kinds of IP that matter in this case are Copyright & Patents.

Copyright Issues: If his reimplementation of the solution from his former job is a cut & paste of old code to new then there probably most likely are issues since most corporations own copyright on code written by employees. Reimplementing the same strategies from memory should not affect copyright [unless he has a photographic memory].

Patent Issues: If the technology he worked on was patented by your employee's former employer then there will be licensing issues which depend on how he signed over the patent to his former employers.

There are also the Non-compete clauses in employment contracts which although do not strictly have anything to do with IP law can severly restrict what knowledge you can obtain from him and in severe cases may require you to fire him like in the CrossGain vs. Microsoft situation

It seems that the the Deal that Yahoo struck with the RIAA a while back has an awful lot to do with the back room shennaniganns that were somewhat implicate in the CARP arrangement.

This deserves major news coverage of it's own.

Kurt Hanson of Save Internet Radio has a letter that he received from Mark Cuban, former owner of audionet.com/broadcast.com/Yahoo! Broadcast on how the Yahoo!-RIAA deal was structured. Read the entire letter here.

Bottom line:

• The voluntary royalty deal between Yahoo! and the RIAA that the Librarian of Congress announced as his template for the entire industry last week was a deal crafted by Yahoo! to shut out small webcasters and decrease competition.
• The villian in this story is not Yahoo! (They were simply being savvy businesspeople!) The villian is the CARP process by which this anti-broadcaster, anti-small-webcaster deal became the template for the industry
• As Mark Cuban says, they didn't want percent-of-revenue pricing art Broadcast.com Why? Because "it meant every "Tom , Dick, and Harry" webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn't".

Before purchasing, I would wait until the end of July. According to this story, Apple is going to release some Windows software for managing the iPod. I have a feeling that this software is going to allow Windows users to work with the iPod like you can work with it on the Mac. (Flashing memory, restoring system, etc.) Of course, it will still be easier on a Mac.

I saw a story on Apple releasing some software for the iPod on Windows? I would be shocked if the software doesn't allow you to restore the system on your iPod. You only need to wait until the New York conference (a few weeks away).

"News.com did an interview with CmdrTaco."

Good GOD that picture was far, far worse than goatse.cx!!

News.com did an interview with CmdrTaco.

View Here

There's a number of great lines in there, like the one where CmdrTaco says that Slashdot 'breaks stories' that MSNBC will later pick up!! Hah hah. What stories has Slashdot ever "broken"? Note: Linking to a page where a story has "broken" doesn't make you the "braker".

But wait, this is the kicker:

"Malda, who goes by the alias "CmdrTaco," today oversees a must-read Web site for anyone trying to read the collective pulse of the tech industry."

Hahah hahahah!! Yeah Slashdot is the collective pulse of the tech industry... I repeat, hahah hahahah!