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Since when does German law apply in other countries?
Since when does French law apply in other countries?

I'm pretty sure I could come up with a few other things as well. Oh yes, in this particular case it might be since Russia started to join the WTO.

Sony Exec's have already hinted at the PS4, however not anytime soon... 2010 expected timeframe for a new Sony console.

"Don't I automatically own the copyright to anything I write? If that is so, then would having a link to any web-page that you didn't write yourself be an infringement? Are links generated by search engines now illegal in Australia?"

Doubtful. The news.com.com.com article goes a little more in to this. He tried the "google defense" and was rebuffed. While it's clear that many Slashdotters do not see the difference between operating a general-purpose search engine and operating a site with the express purpose of providing links to pirated MP3s, the justices in this case did.

I'm too lazy to do a search, but I remember that too.

The USA's DMCA apparently extends to linking to information that can be used to defeat copyright protection schemes, as upheld in the 2600 case.

Also, people in the US have been arrested and jailed for giving presentations that indicated weaknesses in copyright protections.

The Ipod integration found in most cars is nothing more than a 3.5mm input. This is true for all GM cars, I know this for a fact.

Wrong

BMW is the only car manufacturer that I know of that is able to put the track info on the dashboard.

Really wrong

Friend, you need to learn about this here Google thingy. It's a real help in finding stuff. Like the fact that when Apple lists manufacturers with "iPod Integration", they mean manufacturers who have integrated iPod display and control into the automaker's head unit and/or steering wheel controls.

Feel smarter now?

The [Iranian] government contends that the principal target is pornography and other morally offensive material. The word "sex" is among those blocked.

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.

Yeah, Microsoft decided to increase the Zune's marketing budget in an effort to draw some more attention to it. Apparently the first month of sales didn't really put them on the "1MM Zunes by June" track that they want to be on.

Given negative press about SANDisk, I'd bet we'll see word of mouth point people elsewhere. Apple will probably pick up most of them, but Zune could see it's marketshare increase as well:

http://news.com.com/Why+its+hard+not+to+be+a+tech+ Grinch/2010-1041_3-6139869.html

Of course they love Apple. Without Apple, they would have a desktop monopoly.

Which is exactly why Microsoft didn't let them go bankrupt about 10 years back...

http://news.com.com/MS+to+invest+150+million+in+Ap ple/2100-1001_3-202143.html

Ballmer--never known to mince words--is quick to point out where he sees Linux lacking. "The Linux client hardly runs any applications except a bunch of shareware stuff that's not very good," he said. "There has yet to be any innovation, new features, new capabilities out of the Linux platform."

it doesn't make any sense to swap out a working and functional server running intel chips with one running AMD purely for power saving, because electricity is a relatively small of the lifetime cost of a server, until

• the server no longer has adequate spare capacity and would be upgraded
• you're beginning to overload your power or cooling grid, and its cheaper to regrade your servers (which can be deployed elsewhere) than change the power grid or fix your air-con

it's a similar problem for car users - for an average vehicle doing 25mpg, about half the energy of its lifetime of making, using, and recycling/scrap is consumed when making.. environmentally it's best to fix up an old car so it runs properly with minimal emissions than generate a lot of scrap metal & plastics and incur the environmental costs of mining/refining metals, drilling for oil for plastics, manufacture etc of a new car.

Considering that Xeons have been around for years now, for all the parent stated these could be old 1Ghz or slower Xeon based servers. Rather than upgrading to the latest, they decided to switch platforms, which would meet your criteria.

However, I disagree with your statement that the cost to power a server is a small fraction of its cost. A basic server, costing about $4k (nothing fancy), running 24x7x365.25 at about 300Watts, will use 18408.6 KWH in one year. At $0.07/KWH, thats $1288.60 per year just to power the box. Data center design estimates usually state the power overhead for a server is about the same ammount it actually consumes, so that raises the cost per year to $2577.20, more than half its original hardware cost. Most servers I manage are in the rack for well over 2years, so stating that its a small portion of the lifetime cost is invalid. This does not include items such as maintenance contracts, software licenses and other similar costs because those dont really change between different platforms. Even Google recognizes this, and its the whole reason behind both AMD and SUNs newer processor lines:

Link

blah

tm

Anaesthetica has solid bone or rocks for brains

/. - Tell-us-something-we-don't-know.
Anaesthetica should have saved this bullshit for 2007/04/01, or anaesthetica is another one of those ignorant politicians' staffers or lobbyist. If anaesthetica is a staffer or OPEC or AgriBiz lobbyist, then they need to be honest enough to identify themselves as expressing corporatist interest and just spinning-truth to fit lies.

Last I checked, our planet's surface is about two-fucking-thirds water. For our/global economy and environment Hydrogen and SolarCell technology is the only way to solve energy/fuel and air-pollution problems permanently.

I hate stupid staffers, lobbyist, corporatist, and damn fool dogmatist with faux-answers.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/39936.pdf
Results from the Vehicle/Infrastructure Learning Demonstration Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=17774&ch=energy
Cheap, Superefficient Solar Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the sun are becoming more viable.
http://news.com.com/Solar+cell+breaks+efficiency+r ecord/2100-11395_3-6141527.html
Solar cell breaks efficiency record
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/12/06/027 228.shtml
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35174.pdf
Progress in High-Performance PV: Polycrystalline Thin-Film Tandem Cells
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0360-3199(97)00102-X
Affordable hydrogen supply pathways for fuel cell vehicles
http://dx.doi.org/index.html
http://www.greenwatts.com/docs/ProgressInPhotovolt aics.pdf
Energy Pay-Back and Life Cycle CO2 Emissions of the BOS in an Optimized 3.5 MW PV Installation

Anaesthetica has solid bone or rocks for brains

/. - Tell-us-something-we-don't-know.
Anaesthetica should have saved this bullshit for 2007/04/01, or anaesthetica is another one of those ignorant politicians' staffers or lobbyist. If anaesthetica is a staffer or OPEC or AgriBiz lobbyist, then they need to be honest enough to identify themselves as expressing corporatist interest and just spinning-truth to fit lies.

Last I checked, our planet's surface is about two-fucking-thirds water. For our/global economy and environment, Hydrogen and SolarCell technology is the only way to solve energy/fuel and air-pollution problems permanently.

I hate stupid staffers, lobbyist, corporatist, and damn fool dogmatist with faux-answers.

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy06osti/39936.pdf
Results from the Vehicle/Infrastructure Learning Demonstration Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=17774&ch=energy
Cheap, Superefficient Solar Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the sun are becoming more viable.
http://news.com.com/Solar+cell+breaks+efficiency+r ecord/2100-11395_3-6141527.html
Solar cell breaks efficiency record
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/12/06/027 228.shtml
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35174.pdf
Progress in High-Performance PV: Polycrystalline Thin-Film Tandem Cells
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0360-3199(97)00102-X
Affordable hydrogen supply pathways for fuel cell vehicles
http://dx.doi.org/index.html
http://www.greenwatts.com/docs/ProgressInPhotovolt aics.pdf
Energy Pay-Back and Life Cycle CO2 Emissions of the BOS in an Optimized 3.5 MW PV Installation

Analysts said the investigation may focus on actions from some years ago.

A news report from Korean wire service Yonhap speculated that the probe may zero in on suspicions of collusion during 2003-2004, when LCD makers had better control of the market.

"From what we have heard, the investigation may be stemming from a situation two or three years ago when the two companies were selling LCD panels at comparable prices," said Michael Min, an analyst at Korea Investment & Securities.

Funny that you should mention that. It looks like Senator John McCain might be thinking along similar lines,...

Back in 2000, Intel made an effort to investigate the boot cycle for a PC contrasted with how people actually used their computers. By eliminating things like floppy seeks and redundancies. By streamlining the BIOS, they enabled a POST time of 25 seconds, down from their 60 second benchmark.
http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing /it08001.pdf

Although I can't find any articles right now, I do remember the term "Zero Boot Time PC" from an article, or maybe it was a Comdex buzzword. Bottom line is that PCs still take time to get to the OS, but it's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be. Hibernation doesn't get me up and running any faster, since I'm running 2gb of ram and XP seems to take forever to save/restore this data. The other downside of XP's hibernation is that when you boot the PC, you have to use it within a certain amount of time, or it shuts off again.

Intel's got a Flash RAM solution in the pipes, it seems: http://news.com.com/Intel+cuts+PC+boot+time/2100-1 041_3-5897993.html

As to the reason that the article's poster might have such a long bootup time, I'd chalk it up to SATA, RAM counting/testing and the BIOS in general. After googling "zero boot time" I didn't get any hits for AMD, or off brand chipset makers. That leads me to believe that Intel is probably leading the pack, in terms of making PCs POST/Boot faster.

Other uses: declarative transactions, policy enforcement (eg, don't allow calls to JDBC outside of a DAO, I/O calls in an EJB), pooling and caching, declarative security, thread safety (eg, with Swing), remote method invocation. Your example of get* methods that you don't want aspects to apply to can be handled in AspectJ by using annotations to identify pointcuts. I've been using AspectJ for enterprise applications for 4 years now, and it has been very useful. Personally, I find it very easy to understand. For a great introduction and many examples, try the book 'AspectJ in Action'.

Your counter-example of a generic get method that takes a property name as a parameter is a very special case. As a more generic example, consider business methods that take an assortment of parameters, and your validation has to validate the (multiple) parameters. In this case, you might want an aspect that applies validation to all public methods of any class that implements your business interface.

Also, take a look at this: http://news.com.com/2100-1008-5178164.html?tag=cd_ hed/ for a quote from an IBM VIP indicating that they consider AOP to be 'vital to their survival'. And the Spring guys seem thrilled to have better integration with AspectJ.

It's not just the location of the bottom trigger but the location of the top buttons AND their functionality (one is a "thumb pad" type device, the other is a regular old button). Lastly, the Wii-mote is shaped more like a remote control than a gun or a two-handed controller. So, Interlink's remote seems more unique and it bears a striking resemblance to the Wii-mote.

Best image is here

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2006/news/12/ 08/90interlink_screen005.jpg

I have to admit that I can't think of a another remote control looking device with a trigger on the bottom.

criminal charges against the HP board members

Aside from former HP chairman Patricia Dunn, the other four charged were actually Kevin T. Hunsaker, HP's former senior lawyer; Ronald DeLia, a private detective; Matthew DePante, of data-brokering company Action Research Group; and Bryan Wagner, a Colorado man believed to have been an employee of Action Research. Not much from the board per se, but the charges seem to cover the responsible parties.

So these crooked corporate executives make the decision to have their company settle out of court.

I find it amusing that you quoted the article but somehow managed to neglect this, also from the article: "The case is separate from the felony criminal charges that have been brought against five individuals."

Also bear in mind that the executive most responsible, chairman Patricia Dunn, is now a former employee, and is one of the five currently under indictment for the four alleged felony counts — fraudulent wire communications, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit those three crimes. Each of those charges carries a maximum potential prison sentence of three years, and I don't believe that any of the defendants are actually immune from civil litigation.

So much for "getting off scot-free."

Boring yes... until your rubber stamp runs out of ink! Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't HP _already_ have a Chief Ethics Officer (Kevin T. Hunsaker), and didn't he sign off on the spying? Yep

Sony may put together the parts themselves but unless they're employing magic elves in their production facilities they have to get those parts from somewhere.

Most of the cost analysis comes from looking at the separate components, seagate HD, IBM processor, ATI processor, Samsung RAM, etc.. and looking at the associated costs with either purchasing the part or licensing the design, and even includes volume discounts. These costs are relatively stable and well known. The guesstimating comes in when trying to calculate the SONY only parts but even there they can use some similar items to come up with ball park figures. So while you can argue with a person who is claiming to know exactly what the system cost is, when the rough estimates puts the cost in the multiple hundreds above purchase price you can bet that they are not making up the difference with innovative production techniques.

As for historical trends, you could look at Business Week or Cnet or just google it but you've managed to answered your own question with your last statement, "why the Xbox division lost billions over the life of the original Xbox?". Simply put, they could not overcome their loss leading system prices with adequate games sales. Add to that the R&D costs and advertising and they created too much of a hole to dig themselves out of with a 4.75:1 game to system ratio (the last number I could find). If the systems had been making a profit from the get go they may still have lost money overall, but unless their R&D costs were in the double digit billions they would not come out as far behind as they did.

Story from a couple weeks ago...

Not a broken Linux, but a broken Apple;

http://news.com.com/MySpace+to+Apple+Fix+that+worm /2100-7349_3-6141031.html

Reported to slashdot 3 days ago, story accepted, never published.

You are soo correct, if it is Microsoft it is critical news. If it is anyone else, it's covered up.

This story is badly out of date. The panel voted again the next day and reached a compromise that will require future electronic voting machines to have paper trails. See:

http://news.com.com/Panel+changes+course%2C+approv es+e-voting+checks/2100-1028_3-6140956.html
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1095

I'll use your only argument that OS X is secure (which I've already addressed over, and over), and replace "OS X" with "MS-DOS 6.22".

Cite a single "remote vulnerability exploit in the wild" against MS-DOS 6.22. You can't, go ahead, I dare you. With Windows I have to worry about hackers writing remote exploits, but with MS-DOS 6.22 none exist at all. MS-DOS 6.22 is therefore more secure than Windows NT 5.x.

By the way, cite a remote exploit for Windows XP SP2.

It's called an inbound firewall, and any OS with one, which isn't being used as a server, can't have a remote exploit in the sense you require.

This makes the number of remote exploits an absurd metric for desktop computer security. What about number of vulnerabilities / number of users? Who do you think would have the largest ratio out of Apple and Microsoft given this more sensible metric?

Sort of the same strategy used against Borland or in Washington DC with lobbyists. Against the former, MS hired up Borland's better developers and sent them out on holiday. Against the latter, the lobbyists were put on retainer to keep them out of circulation. It's interesting how the core activities have shifted over time and are now starting to approach sum cult-like characteristics

• 1970's - software company
• 1980's - operating system company (inherits IBM monopoly)
• 1990's - marketing companyh
• 2000's - political lobbying

[...]like we have in the US where the FCC regulates and taxes VOIP providers.

When did that start happening?

No, you don't! There are several chips with Free 3D-accelerated drivers, such as the older Radeons and Intel integrated graphics, that would run the eye-candy just fine.

My assumption in this case is that the RFID technology will be of some standard similar to those stated in my parent post (ISO 15693, 14443 or other HF standards). In this case, the tags are inductively coupled with the reader antenna primarily through the Magnetic field produced by the current through the antenna wire. This field loses strength very quickly as you move from the source which means a VERY limited read range. The technologies mentioned (UHF and WiFi) interact with the Electromagnetic field which propagates nicely through the air and thus gives longer range. (we can, of course, try to discuss all the lovely physics if needed, but this is my attempt at simplification)

Basically, my point is that while I concede it is possible to hack into RFID credit cards, it is NOT as easy as many like to believe, and I don't feel nearly as threatened as some would suggest I should feel. Also, RFID is NOT one technology. It is a mishmash of all kinds of different standards comprising multiple frequencies and technologies and so should not be lumped together as the one evil tech it is commonly identified as.

The question here is whether Google is sufficiently dominant in Market A, the web search market, to be classified as a monopoly. If they are, then what they are doing could be classified as illegal abuse of that monopoly.

The latest market share figures put google at less than 50% of the US Internet search market. That is pretty far from a monopoly. If Microsoft had 45.4% of the PC OS market and Apple had 28.2 percent and Ubuntu/Linux had 11.7 percent, FreeBSD with 5.8 percent and SunOS had 5.4 percent, then we wouldn't be calling Microsoft a monopoly for desktop OSes. We would consider that a healthy competitive marketplace.

Microsoft, on the other hand, now controls 97.46 percent of the global desktop operating system market, which is clearly a monopoly. But then on the server OS side, Microsoft is pretty far from a monopoly with less than half of the server OS market, with healthy competition between Linux, Solaris and other server OSes.

Much of the time it is night, and storing that much juice in batteries is impractical.

If you can provide 100% of the worlds energy needs (2003 levels) in 70225 square miles then how much can the earth support in total ?

Well the earth has a surface area of 197000000 square miles, so you could provide a little over 2805 times the energy needs of the worlds population (2003 levels). No-one is suggesting we cover the entire planet but at a guess, maybe 3 times the total power needs could be generated at any one time, which would allow for transport losses and still give spare capacity. It wouldn't be necessary to have all the coverage in one place, or even 10 places, the coverage would be distributed to allow most efficient and reliable collection over a 24 hour period.

The only real issues with this solution would be political. Yes, you could have nuclear generation available as well, to cover emergency "blackouts", but we could immediately stop using fossil fuels for power generation. State of the art improvements over time would mitigate transportation losses, and the same would be true for the solar tech itself. I see no problems that can't be overcome with a little effort.

I see a lot of posts complaining that fauna and flora need the sunlight too. Well how does solar collection deprive them of sunlight ? Last I saw, no solar panels are placed horizontally, so they wouldn't block the light significantly. In fact, if we mounted each collection point on a tower, say 20' high, and spaced them 50 yards apart, then the shadow effect would be negligible, if not non-existent.

Imagine the Siberian plains dotted with 1 tower every few miles, ditto the Nevada desert, the Australian Nullaboor Plain and the Arabian peninsular. Combined with roof tops around the planet, I would say we are well on our way to achieving total solar power.

Transport might be an initial sticking point, not land-based, but aviation and seaborne. But both of these can be solved with a bit of thought. Seaborne traffic is mostly container or tanker based and as such has space for onboard solar arrays, combined with kites, plus there is always the nuclear option. Aviation would need the biggest overhaul, but inter-continental stuff could be shifted to a ballistic model using laser power (that's a little bit more "out there" I'll admit). But why can't we have space based lasers beaming power to collection points around the globe, even to a moving vessel at sea or in the air ?

I guess people just want everything all at once, fixed and functional before they'll even consider the possibility of change.

Yeah, I hear this about Maden all the time... That's how it manages to remain one of the biggest selling game titles of all time...

Actually, I think this may have something to do with the fact that they produce the only licensed NFL game. Here's a neat link comparing top games sales for 2004. Notice how Madden is #3 but NFL 2K5 is both #4 and #10 (PS2 and X-Box), of course, that year they "bought out the competition" and then you get numbers like these, where, lo and behold, Madden is now undeniably on top (#1, #4) and they've snuck in with #5: NCAA Football.

Truth is, it seems to me that there is just a big market for american football games. EA didn't really win any major "competition" here, they just bought off the NFL player's union in the very year they seemed to be slipping. Good market strategy, but I definitely won't attribute their sales numbers to game quality. Truth is, Madden is probably just "good enough". There are lots of football fanatics who just want "a game" and Madden meets that criteria.

It _has_ been done already, and dismissed. Check out this story about an ideantical Amazon's A9 Maps feature.

And it was closed down after about a year.

http://news.com.com/Amazon+A9+takes+it+to+the+stre ets/2100-1032_3-5833916.html

http://maps.a9.com/

So it's not 'new'. I think part of the problem is that A9 didn't have their own maps feed.

According to c/net it was the internal microphone. They give some consideration to the possibility of a separate bug but conclude the weight of evidence points to the internal microphone being activated without the owner's knowledge.

While I'm at it I'll repeat a comment I posted on Technocrat:

Given that all mobile/cell phones are required to be locatable (its for your own safety remember?) and need to be accurately synchronised with a base station, what are the chances of forming a phased array using all microphones within a certain radius of a point? That way one could eavesdrop on a conversation well away from the nearest mobile phone.

I would guess that there is no need for a super accurate location or time. Measure the two as close as possible then record all streams from mobiles in the area. Next feed the whole lot into a super computer and do a big cross correlation with sliding windows centred about the best guess at relative phase (based on the measured location and time).

It is worth noting that the wavelength of the radio signals a mobile phone uses is comparable to the wavelength of the audio frequencies of the human voice. Thus in theory it is possible for a mobile phone base station to locate a mobile phone to within a fraction of an audio wavelength, exactly what is needed for a phased array.

http://www.linuxtoday.com/it_management/2003061301 126NWSVLL

You have to remember that Sun changes its mind on whether Linux is good or evil every few months, just like they cancel then resurrect Solaris x86 periodically. This was a few flips back. Don't bet your business on Sun following through on their promises... however, this is getting quite a lot better. Actions like putting Java under the GPL are not just cool, they're pretty irreversible. They're considering making Solaris GPL too... were that to happen, both Solaris and Linux would get much better very quickly, and I would never say anything bad about Sun again. I swear!

That's just the thing. You can't put an exact price on materials for a high technology item like Cell for instance.

Well, you can, but that's only a tiny fraction of it's real cost, so it's an essentially meaningless number.

Let's make some assumptions here, for the purpose of analogy.

Assume it cost $1 Billion to develop the technology in Cell.

Assume that it cost annother $1 Billion to build and / or retool the foundries that make Cell processors.

Assume that the cost in raw materials is $20 for each cell chip.

Assume that it takes 1 hour of assembly line time to build a Cell chip.

Assume that the foundry can build 50 cell chips simultaniously.

Assume that it costs $1,000 an hour to run the foundry (not including materials).

That gives us a rough cost on the part itself. $1000 / 50 chips simultaniously = $20 in foundry time per chip + $20 in materials = $40.

That gives you a very simple, very wrong (depending on your point of view) number of $40 per chip.

Now you have the sticky matter of that $2 Billion to deal with. ($1 Billion in R&D + $1 Billion for the foundry).

This is simply a matter of scale. If I make 1 Million chips, then I divide $2 Billion by 1 Million units and come up with $2,000 per chip. For a total cost of $2,040 per chip.

Now if I don't stop building the chips after a couple months, and actually make say, 100 Million of them over a few years, then you're looking at a cost of $60 per chip (($2B / 100M Units) + $40 = $60). Huge difference. Mostly because of the startup costs. Are you amortizing those into 1 Million units or 100 Million? Simple, really. But it makes putting a precise, tidy number on the cost of the part hard to do.

Now the cost of each new technology in PS3 is going to have the same problems (though probably most intense with the Cell chip). Blu-Ray, I would expect similar issues, though not as dramaticly. And there are other factors I haven't accounted for as well (Bad yields, patents, lowering of production costs over time, etc.). But when they say the actual parts for a Core 2 or an FX are only a few dollars, they're right.

Please note that I'm not in any way an insider in this area, I've just read just enough to be dangerous. All the numbers here were just made up on the spot, and may be wildly inaccurate. They should, however convey the basic idea of how the economics of this kind of thing works. You can read a bit more about this here if you're curious, or you can purchase the origional report here if you have $3,000 sitting around.

Hopefully this clears things up though.

You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs encountered.

You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs encountered.

"The general pattern I see are the artsy types get macs because they either arent' interested in gaming or want a "just works" box. The compsi geeks all have x86 machines to dual boot and play games on"

What rock have you been living under for the past 18 months?

This one.

Also covered here.

And here.

If there was crypto used, it absolutely sucked.

If all you need is a modem line tap or an illegal program to crack ATM's, there isn't much security is there?

I don't think there is crypto. I think the information is sent across the phone lines as plain text. The purpose of the modem line tap or illegal program is to convert the signal going over the line (the same signal you hear when you pick up the phone during a fax or internet connection) to text. From there, no mention is made of encryption.

See this page. "The Modem Line Tap, MLT2400A is a modem protocol analyzer that translates telephone data communications into standard ASCII characters for display on a PC screen."

If the data was properly encrypted before it was sent, the hackers wouldn't have been able to use the data. If there was crypto, it was token crypto at best. Just enough to tell their share holders it was encrypted.

The chief qestion here as the litigation begins to play ut is when do the investors in SCO begin ulling out of what appears ever more strongly to be a losing battle? Or do they continue to just throw good money after bad and accept the loss on what maybe no better then a lottery's chance of winning anything?

This lawsuit is nothing more than a proxy pr campaign on behalf of Microsoft against Linux. For the bargain price of 16.6 million and another $50 million investment that Microsoft help arrange, Microsoft has allowed SCO to be a PR thorn in Linux's side for several years now.

The investors have gotten exactly what they wanted in the first place, not by winning, not by securing SCO's corporate future as a legitamite business. Just by fighting the battle for this long and keeping IBM wrapped up in court and keeping Linux in the news with the allegation that is is a potential intellectual property infringer and a risk to business, SCO's real investor has gotten exactly what they wanted without exposing Microsoft directly.

Now that SCO has nearly run out of steam, you hear rumblings from Microsoft itself about the Intellectual property allegations against Linux. It is clearly their strategy to sow fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) as much as possible in advance of Windows Vista coming out.

It is hardly a conspiracy theory when the money changing hands and the strategy have been made so clear. SCO is a shell of a company, being used in a shell game.

The chief qestion here as the litigation begins to play ut is when do the investors in SCO begin ulling out of what appears ever more strongly to be a losing battle? Or do they continue to just throw good money after bad and accept the loss on what maybe no better then a lottery's chance of winning anything?

This lawsuit is nothing more than a proxy pr campaign on behalf of Microsoft against Linux. For the bargain price of 16.6 million and another $50 million investment that Microsoft help arrange, Microsoft has allowed SCO to be a PR thorn in Linux's side for several years now.

The investors have gotten exactly what they wanted in the first place, not by winning, not by securing SCO's corporate future as a legitamite business. Just by fighting the battle for this long and keeping IBM wrapped up in court and keeping Linux in the news with the allegation that is is a potential intellectual property infringer and a risk to business, SCO's real investor has gotten exactly what they wanted without exposing Microsoft directly.

Now that SCO has nearly run out of steam, you hear rumblings from Microsoft itself about the Intellectual property allegations against Linux. It is clearly their strategy to sow fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) as much as possible in advance of Windows Vista coming out.

It is hardly a conspiracy theory when the money changing hands and the strategy have been made so clear. SCO is a shell of a company, being used in a shell game.

Not 8 cores 80 cores

> I'll don my tinfoil hat when they attach it to passengers, but this looks like one place where RFID can be put to good use.

At your service:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/2100-1009_11- 6125799.html

I suggest a fur-lined hat for winter use.

Yes and downloading music with p2p software in Canada is legal :)

... but probably not for long :(

Beating competitors is what Microsoft is all about. It's not "we'll have the best search engine," it's "we'll be better than Google". I guess we see the results: years of no browser updates, few significant OS updates and, now, a crappy music player...

Let's see what we have here, viewed from an open standards/FOSS perspective, from someone with no prior knowledge of anyone in the group:

Technology Working Group:

Chair, Charles SteelFisher, New Media Director, Deval Patrick Committee
Creative director at ALIPES CME. Original Flash site that takes a few minutes to figure out what the hell is going on. I like it and hate it all at once. Wife(?) is director of Strategy at Cogent Research. Verdict: Not promising, but who knows.

Chair, Richard Rowe, CEO, Rowe Communications
Not a lot of info there!
More info in the bio here. Looks like an interesting guy. "He is the author of numerous articles and frequent speaker on the impact of digitization and the internet upon society with a particular focus on access to and preservation of academic, scientific, technical and medical knowledge." That could go either way, but sounds good.

Brian Burke, Microsoft
For what it's worth, this is a broad technology working group (not just on, say, standards), so I don't think it's insane to have MS at the table. But there are software companies with deeper MA roots...

John Cullinane, Principal, The Cullinane Group
Was a trailblazer in the proprietary software industry (a href='http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/culli nane.html'>Cullinane Corp), which is kinda sorta threatened by FOSS. That said, who knows where his head is at today.

Louis Gutierrez, former State CIO and Director of ITD
Former as in about a month ago. He's our man!

Keith Parent, CEO, Court Square
Let's see, found here that they have "Extensive experience with Wintel, Unix, Citrix and Linux platforms" and "Successful migration projects include; VMS to NT, NT to Unix, NT to Linux." Sounds reasonably OK to me, though a little dated!

David Lewis, Private Consultant
I presume this is him. On the board at the Mass Tech Dev Corp, and has done a lot of state IT work, so he's certainly relevant. Can't find anything about him re: ODF.

Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group
This talk suggests that Larry "gets it", but I haven't listened to it yet. IT Conversations is awesome, by the way. find the Clayton Christensen talk on open source. Here it is.

All told, as someone sympathetic to FOSS, who thinks FOSS is good for most businesses, I find this group to be well qualified, and apparently with a diverse set of viewpoints on standards and such. Diversity is good. I'll be watching this group as closely as I can.