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Dell's printers are rebadged from other manufacturers. I searched Google for "dell a920 rebadged" and found that your printer is either a rebadged Lexmark X1150 or X1180. Unfortunately, linuxprinting.org has no record of either printer. Lexmark is something of a persona non grata among the Free Software set for invoking the dreaded DMCA to fight 3rd-party cartridge vendors, so even folks who would write printer drivers may stay away from Lexmark on principle. Sorry. :(

> Then how do you explain all the people like Linus who run Linux on Apple hardware?

Linus got it for free. :-)

Short story?

Microsoft knew that if they could get people on board by promising free upgrades, they would ensure that their deep-discount, high-volume customers were now paying near to full price, and that if they could stretch the release cycle to more than 36 months, they could avoid having to give out even one single stinking copy of the upgraded software.

As a Microsoft customer, you have been pushed from paying ~30% for your software to paying around ~100%, and the most hyped benefit - free upgrades - just got yanked away. If you still think any of this is accidental, you deserve Software Assurance.

• Darrow, Barbara. "Microsoft, The New IBM." CRN 7 Jun 2004
• Goldberg, Aaron. "Microsoft Hits Downslope." eWeek 19 May 2003
• Kanellos, Michael. "The Rise and Fall of the Wintel Empire." ZDNet 5 Aug 2004
• Reifman, Jeff. "Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow." Seattle Weekly 2 Jun 2004

http://news.com.com/2102-7344_3-6061491.html?tag=s t.util.print
Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0512 .0/0972.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0602 .1/0274.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0602 .0/1051.html

Like when Micron bought the IBM/Toshiba memory fab business. The same memory made buy the same people but now it was a Micron product which people will typically pay a premium for.

"We have not changed our strategy. We have this mixed environment and run a hybrid model. We do it for good reason. Our customers want flexibility, so, over time, they can make the decision to source us in, or upscale the functionality and integrate us into the back end.

You can do this on-demand for certain areas and certain functions, but not for everything. Everybody starts with salesforce automation because it makes sense since it's not very structured. It's simple and more office-like. But the more you come from this type (of system) to the core of CRM (customer relationship management), the more difficult it will become to do it on-demand. People don't want to share the data with others."

EULAs are not binding legally[...]

Source please.

I'm sorry, I can't provide evidence for something that has never happened.

Here is an example of a class action lawsuit from users against a company's EULA: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983988.html

Here is some info regarding your rights under a EULA: http://www.eff.org/wp/eula.php

There is no button when displaying a EULA that says, "I cannot agree or disagree with this EULA because I am under the age of 18 and not able to agree or disagree with legally binding contracts".

How many people buy Thinkpads in Wallmart?

Now they will do. They're just switching their market for premium-buyers to cheapskates, or somewhere in between.

In related news, they will be selling in Best-Buy. http://news.com.com/Lenovos+Best+Buy+deal+may+attr act+normal+folk/2100-1047_3-6059957.html

I guess it all makes sense for them.

When CNET News.com asked Bill Gates about software patents, he shifted the subject to "intellectual property," blurring the issue with various other laws. Then he said anyone who won't give blanket support to all these laws is a communist.

If the NSA can get usable info from blinking LEDs, what are the security risks of this scultpure? Nearly everyone knows that radio communications can be freely spied upon, we've all seen scanners that let you listen in to police band radio, but other methods of intercepting communications rarely come to the mind of Joe Average. TEMPEST and NONSTOP attacks have been well-researched for decades, but the closest they've gotten to general public knowledge is Neal Stephenson's use of the concept in Cryptonomicon .

Ok, so it's unlikely to happen anyways - but if one were to toy around with the thought that Macs would rise to take a significant portion of the operating systems used, what would that mean? Not much, from my point of view. It would just mean new vendor lock-in, and probably even worse interoperability as the Apple specific formats become more common. While today WMA, DOC, XLS and PPT are enough trouble, we'd add AAC, CWK, SIT and what have you to the list. DRM will be just as common and prevalent (witness Fairplay and iTunes).

I'll readily admit that I don't know much about Macs and the formats that are used, maybe most are or are becoming open - I just know that every so often I get a file I can't open from a Mac user (yesterday, an AppleWorks file was the most recent). It was the same when I used Windows, so apparently little has changed over the years. That I can open MS files is just because the community has been so hard at work deciphering the formats and reimplementing them. If Apple becomes any more common, the community possibly would have to start over.

The way that Apple has handled any open source connections to their OS and other products quite clearly shows that they only want to take advantage of it, not contribute back [1] [2] [3]. While open standards and open source is not the same thing, and standards is IMO more important, they share a lot of common attributes and philosophy behind. I don't think Apple is interested in either.

It's quite possible that Apple makes a great OS, and great hardware, but it is also quite clear that they are just as predatory and monopolistic as ever Microsoft - they just haven't had the numbers to make the same impact. And I couldn't care which vendor tries to lock me hard to their platform and their DRM, it's all bad in either case. Until Apple decides to play fair with the rest of the world I won't be thinking any better of them than I do MS - being the underdog does not excuse bad behaviour, nor does "but they are doing it".

Being pragmatic to me does not only mean "use what works" it also means looking at what "will work" - and what will continue to do so.

(PS, I can't get a new, open format copy of the cwk file I received until the end of April due to vacations - anyone know of anything that can read this format on a Linux system? Thanks. DS)

In the dawn of the PS3, the system specs were all powerful. The almighty Cell processor has 8 SPEs and would take advantage of other Cell processors on the network, such as those in your TV. It was kind of like Devastator, the processors combining to become even more powerful.

Then we find out that Sony is having trouble making Cell chips with 8 working SPEs. So the PS3 is promised to only have 7 working SPEs for each system.

Today we find out that the OS will always consume an SPE and has the right to abduct another when necessary. This reduces the potential number of SPEs that a developer can reliably count on for a game to use at all times is reduced to 5.

The true power of the PS3 keeps being reduced the closer to launch it becomes. Additional features have already been dropped. How many more will evaporate before the PS3 becomes a real device you can go to the store and buy?

"Cell will create a new extensible computing platform. A set-top box containing a Cell chip could, for example, combine to share processing power with a Cell-powered high-definition television to render the graphics of an animated movie."

"A game console might use a chip with 16 cores, while a less complicated device like a set-top box would have a processor with fewer"

"It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz."

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html

Don't you think someone should be asking these questions?

"Cell will create a new extensible computing platform. A set-top box containing a Cell chip could, for example, combine to share processing power with a Cell-powered high-definition television to render the graphics of an animated movie."

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html

Elsewhere it was conjectured that these people had actually installed Windows XP over OS X.

I guess this will merely separate the real pirates from the need pirates.

I'm not going to hide anything, I pirated Matlab and Mathematica in college. But I wasn't selling them or making a profit off them, I was simply installing old versions of them so that I could get my homework done without having to go to campus and be restricted by lab hours. I have since uninstalled them and don't feel wrong for using them to accomplish assignments.

I think there are a lot of pirates here in America and overseas that just want a functioning OS on which they can install their games and quicken and other such Win32 software. Even I would prefer a Windows "Lite" over Windows with Aero. The last thing I want is some fancy pants CPU hog with Rosie O'Donnel sized memory footprints running around in the background!

I would really like to see a free Windows OS "Core" kernal system that doesn't have any features but can be downloaded and installed easily. You could purchase more and more expansions or just buy the loaded omgwtfbbq$999 version of Windows right off the bat with everything from Office Suite Complex SP8 to Windows Media Player with more skins than an 18th century fur trader.

The real pirates are going to try everything to be able to crack and sell these advanced copies. They'll do it regardless of what features Windows has. There's already speculation on how to do it.

If you're making one version more secure than another, you're simply admitting that you're not too concerned about the minimal package being pirated but you cannot afford to have Aero pirated. I think that says a lot about how you really view the core operating system and how it's becoming recognized more and more as a necessary tool and not some software bonus. Many software models have developed into being very successful by offering a "Lite" version of the software product for free and encouraging an upgrade to more features by buying a full fledged license from the homepage. The very piece of software I'm using right now to author and spellcheck this post (Textpad) is marketed in this manner.

So I welcome this new news that only the rich, powerful & non-collegiate will have Aero. Let them have their bells and whistles!

You gotta give the Japan people props about their notorious trains, because they're not trains, they're, I don't know, space ships.

How many G does a passenger feel as the "train" accelerates? I mean, some of them look up side down I wonder if the seats are on the roofs?

Also most of them don't actually touch the rails they fly on a magnetic fields or something, right?

Do passengers have to pass a special training to ride on one of those trains?

Has it happened that a Japanese train can't take a corner and just flies off never to be seen anymore?

Anyhow, I bet they are really proud of their trains, and they have to. Good luck with hydrogen bomb ones as well!

I mean hydrogen fuel cell, sorry.

Wow, maybe your post is irony but there are plenty of horror stories about working at EA.
Game development has become stylish and lots of people think it's the greenest grass in the pasture. I beg to differ. It's highly competitive; lessers tend to get weeded out pretty quickly, especially since you product is in the public domain. It can be enormously stressful.. There are so many elements that need to converge to create the final deliverable product. Most internal business applications don't have sound, music, packaging, animations, art and story lines, and you really don't have as much creative license as you might think. Teams are so big, you are compartmentalized into a small portion of the bigger picture. You might spend months coding AI routines.

Of course, I only write games as a hobby (which is pretty fun), and all of the above is second hand here say, but computer game development should be taken seriously as pull your hair out, bleeding edge computer science.

The chinese government isn't doing this to promote Windows. They're actually promoting something else.

Here it is as an actual link, which I was too lazy to do the first time around:
http://news.com.com/2061-10793_3-6059694.html

Painlessly dip?

"After partitioning their hard drives and installing Windows XP--which seems to work fine--these people find they can no longer boot back into OS X" doesn't sound very painless.

Proof that Steve Jobs owned Pixar:
http://news.com.com/Pixar+goes+to+Hollywood/2009-1 026_3-6030125.html

Smoke that!

from my blog
I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.
Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.
My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.
Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.
Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.
Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.
So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

I wonder how this will play with the JBoss and Microsoft agreement that was made in September. That deal was for Microsoft to work with JBoss so that JBoss can run better on MS servers. Clearly, having JBoss run better on Microsoft servers is against the interests of Red Hat.

But people have been predicting a switch for years. And Would anyone accept a bet on what a company will do in 5 years time? If you bet them that Apple will switch to Intel in the next year every year since rumours first started, you would be very very poor by now.

"Linspire's chief technical officer, Tom Welch, agreed that his company would definitely consider DRM."

http://news.com.com/DRM%20key%20to%20Linuxs%20cons umer%20success/2100-7344_3-6058790.html?tag=techdi rt

MjM

You can goddamn betcha the BSA has had an influence. My startup will be a Microsoft-free zone - I can't afford to have my business disrupted by a bunch of extortionate asshats because someone might have slipped up with an Office CDROM, and why go through the hassle of switching when I can do it properly right from the git-go?

http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

So long, Redmond. You coulda had a bunch of seats, but I'm too busy to watch my back for the BSA, and frankly the security holes aren't helping much either. Seeya.

Ernie Ball has something to tell you. Not sure that's the best account of that story. Then there are the school districts that have been attacked. They tend to pick targets and make examples of them. Sure, lots of places have "casual" violations, but the BSA comes in and asks you for affirmative proof of license for every piece of software on every computer you have - or else.

Apparently (IANAL) most people screw up by letting these folks in the door - they aren't the law after all. Some say the only thing you should show them is your middle finger.

Don't judge a site by the URL...that was the only one available!! Just because the site is news.news...doesn't mean crap... http://news.com.com/Court+filings+tell+of+Internet +spying/2100-1029_3-6058769.html?tag=nefd.top

High-def TV not ready for Net's prime time http://news.com.com/2100-1034_3-6058744.html?part= rss&tag=6058744&subj=news

So instead of reuters or the washington post or, shit, even cnet, we get a nobody gamer site with an article that has no links to anybody credible. Brilliand reporting from slashdot, as usual.

when in an internal memo, Bill Gates said "We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing."

Remind me, again... how many major OS releases and services packs and IE versions have been released since then?

As a point of references, some history is useful.

RIM made lots and lots of noise about their own IP, and have gone after lots of people before finding themselves on the other side of the ball.

"RIM is alleging that Good is infringing on its patents, according to the suit. The first is "for a method and apparatus to remotely control gateway functions in a wireless data communications network." The second "relates to a method and system for loading an application program on a device." The third "relates to a method and system for transmitting data files between computers in a wireless data communications environment."

or this one

"Ontario, Canada-based RIM charges in a suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware that Glenayre Technologies violates a patent granted last month to RIM protecting the way the BlackBerry redirects e-mail from a computer or server to a handheld using a single e-mail address." - http://news.com.com/RIM+wins+patent%2C+sues+rival/ 2100-1040_3-257801.html?tag=st.ref.goo

Anyways, my point is that RIM really loved patents when they could shut out their competition with them, but disliked them when someone heard them making lots of noise about their IP and said, wait a minute, we have patents in the same area. Despite extrodinarily preferential treatment by the USPTO (ie, no one else will get patents they context reviewed that fast ever), they still were unable to prevail.

Something def needs to be fixed on the patent side, but there is something interesting also about RIM getting some of its own medicine. I wonder if someone has a more complete history on their annoucements on monetizing their IP portfolio.

Quad-core models are the next step and a further indication that Intel's effort to improve performance focuses more on adding more cores than on increasing a chip's clock speed.

Don't buy AT&T stock, the chairman doesn't understand his own business. As long as there is one isp and one backbone who think that having customers is better than revenue sharing, there will be more than one isp and backbone who think that. There doesn't need to be a network neutrality law, the situation is already covered by price-fixing laws.

Google owns lots of dark fiber. They will route around damaged carriers, if it gets that far. Here's one of many articles:

http://news.com.com/Google%20wants%20dark%20fiber/ 2100-1034_3-5537392.html

I don't think they want to build out their own network, but it is probably a cheap hedge against paid transport.

As far as your airplane analogy goes, FAA or not, planes still crash. The deregulators aren't worried about passenger settlements and what not, they figure that people won't fly on crappy airlines. Airlines are in the business of selling seats. Crashing is going to make that difficult to do. Therefore, airlines will attempt not too crash. It is probably a better trade off to have a burdensome FAA provide the safety, as less people die, but there would be safe ways to fly, FAA or not.

Still alive: Senator wants to ban 'fast lane' for Web.

check this out

gMail saves your emails after you delete them. Even if you use IMAP. Other ISP's do NOT. See, Google is in the business of using your personal information to make money, and by saving it long enough and aggregating it they can see trends and make money.

I don't run my own web server but I have the next best thing - a good friend who is. And I know his email volume, he doesn't back up emails (most ISP's don't, google is the exception - remember advertising is their lifeblood) so when I delte them they are gone.

Be wary of google. They want to index the world's knowlege, they want to aggregate your life - make sure you want to give it up to them.

Yahoo has denied the family of a dead soldier access to his yahoo email account. I'm not taking sides on this, but it is a real issue. http://news.com.com/Yahoo+denies+family+access+to+ dead+marines+e-mail/2100-1038_3-5500057.html

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-870805.html

Stangely enough http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ has disappeared

Some waybacks

http://web.archive.org/web/20040815070955/www.weha vethewayout.com/us/index.asp

The difference between the June 2004 version

http://web.archive.org/web/20040619041226/http://w ww.wehavethewayout.com/us/resourcecenter.asp

And the May 2003 version

http://web.archive.org/web/20030501180724/http://w ww.wehavethewayout.com/us/resourcecenter.asp

of the report is interestingly different

Yahoo has denied the family of a dead soldier access to his yahoo email account. I'm not taking sides on this, but it is a real issue. http://news.com.com/Yahoo+denies+family+access+to+ dead+marines+e-mail/2100-1038_3-5500057.html

Clicky.

I read a related article earlier which was saying Tux needs to go on a diet.
It appears people are making comparisons between linux distributions and MS bloatware.

I tend to agree, I would like to see the consolidation of the best features from all the programs, sort of a best of breed contest without things like 7 different browsers and 43 editors all doing a very similar job but just not quite managing perfection.

heres the article link.

CNET correctly reports that it was faulty convention wiring and not a Unisys server.

Uhm, how does this relate to their core business again? Seems like they're going willynilly all over the place, trying to get into anything that can make them marginal revenue to justify their superhigh stock valuations. I thought they said they weren't going to do that, in their stockholder's manual. Motly Fool had a prescient article on them today.

"If the assholes would just realize the problem is them charging $20 for a CD that 20 years ago they promised would eventually be cheaper than cassettes and vinyl ever were."

Do you have a citation for this promise? The only place I've ever heard it is on Slashdot.

Anyway:

Typical price for a CD in 1985: $18.99. That's $33.70 in 2005 dollars.

Average price of a new CD today in the USA: around $13.

Typical price of an LP in 1985: about $8.00. That's about $14.20 in 2005 dollars. I was often paying $9 or $10 in 1985, and as much as $11.99 for some releases, but I'll use $8.00 as a concession.

CD prices are in freefall. It looks like it's been years since they learned that $20 isn't a good price for new releases. Music is cheaper now than it's ever been. Your advice for them would have been timely about five or ten years ago.

Maybe the piracy is being committed by the people who have been afraid to go to a record store in 5 or 10 years and still think that new releases are twenty bucks?

Strange then that this article on the same site (http://news.com.com/PC+market+surged+in+2005,+wil l+settle+in+2006/2100-1003_3-6028454.html) put Apple's market share for 2005 at 3.3%, representing a growth of 35% for a year in which the overall market grew 9%. Note also that this figure included servers, not just notebooks and desktops, meaning that according to these figures, Apple had 3.3% of _world computer sales_, not just world desktop / laptop sales. So which is it: 1.8% or 3.3%?

"A Mac-user with common sense!"

It's not common sense. It's wrong.

Microsoft is in a unique position. Because it has a virtual monopoly, Microsoft makes more money when its software has a lot of security vulnerabilities. For those who are ruled by money, morality has no force; "Maximizing Shareholder Value" is the way they live their lives.

Microsoft makes more money if it pressures its programmers to work too fast, so that they are sloppy, and then releases buggy software. Many people are fascinated by computers, and easily accept the world that Microsoft has created for them.

Here's a story about a Microsoft VP saying, "Oh, the next Windows operating system will be secure": "Safety and security is the overriding feature that most people will want to have Windows Vista for" .

So, Microsoft is once again telling us "The next version of Windows will be the good one." Before, Microsoft said Windows XP was "Built to be Dependable".

However, Vista will NOT include virus protection. Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platform products and services division told CRN, an industry magazine this:

CRN: In terms of security, how do you compare security in Vista vs. security in Windows XP SP2?

Allchin: SP2 was a very good system but compared to Vista, it's night and day.

CRN: Is there going to be antivirus in Vista?

Allchin: No, there is not.

CRN: Why?

Allchin: It's a complicated answer as to why not.

CRN: Was the decision based on technical concerns?

Allchin: It wasn't technical.

CRN: Will Vista resolve security problems once and for all?

Allchin: I'm not going to claim perfection or near perfection, but I think we're unrivaled in the work we've done. I believe security will be a huge problem for the industry for years and years and years but this will change the landscape in a fairly dramatic way.

Once again, Microsoft is taking advantage of the fact that most of its customers have little technical knowledge. Mr. Allchin said that "security will be a huge problem for the industry for years and years and years".

Microsoft charges for OneCare Live. That's another way to make money. Make sloppy software, and then sell protection against the sloppiness.

Note the emphasis on "beta testing" in Mr. Allchin's statements in the CRN interview. Someone said that Microsoft's motto is "The whole world is our beta tester."

--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits and paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans get Iraq oil profits, and American citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?

Online travel-reservation site GetThere calculated that it saved $1.6 million in licensing fees alone by going with JBoss over commercial Java application servers. That figure will double as the company brings another data center online later this year, said Todd Cinnamon, vice president of engineering at GetThere, which is owned by Sabre.

I worked at GetThere as a Senior Web Developer when they moved from BEA Weblogic to JBoss. Took the core engineering group about two weeks to make the conversion and test the entire codebase. They're still using it to this day.

Now imagine just 50 other companies that have similar needs convert to JBoss over the course of three years. There's your hundreds of millions of dollars.

No matter what the outcome of the case, TiVo is screwed.

http://news.com.com/Comcast%2C+Time+Warner+back+Ca blevision+DVR+plan/2100-1033_3-6056149.html

It is a given that unless you are running as root, malware can't quite make it into the core system.

Yes, do not pay attention to all those Linux exploits and worms, they do not exist, nothing to see here. Sorry, anyone who believes Linux/UNIX systems have no security issues and cannot be rooted is highly delusional. Given it is better than windows, but it is also a lot easier to screw up by a simple misconfiguration. I am not even mentioning ever appearing security holes and exploits.

-Em