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what about the unsinkable ship? no, not that one, this one

That's true, but according to court findings,Microsoft threatened in 1997 to stop support for Office, and used that threat to force Apple to bundle Internet Explorer as part of their campaign against Netscape.

Shortly thereafter is when Microsoft recommitted to the Mac for five years as in the infamous Jobs/Gates presentation, as part of the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple and paid to get off the hook for several of Apple's patents they had been violating.

That's true, but according to court findings,Microsoft threatened in 1997 to stop support for Office, and used that threat to force Apple to bundle Internet Explorer as part of their campaign against Netscape.

Shortly thereafter is when Microsoft recommitted to the Mac for five years as in the infamous Jobs/Gates presentation, as part of the deal where Microsoft invested in Apple and paid to get off the hook for several of Apple's patents they had been violating.

... a patent was recently issued for "an anti-gravity device"

http://news.com.com/2061-11204_3-5942862.html

apparently you can get a patent on something you haven't developed

Just one example, there are many. Believe or not, there are a lot of people in the world who value things other than just "pure profit at any cost." You might not be one of them, or know any personally, but they are out there, millions of them. Yes, many corporations and people are pure greedhogs, but it's not "all". And, at last in the US, the original deal with corporations was to be of the public interest and benefit, corporate profits were secondary. Too bad we lost our way there some time back. Perhaps eventually it might change for the better. Anyway, read on here:

http://news.com.com/Social+funds+warn+Web+firms+on +human+rights/2100-1028_3-5939313.html?tag=cd.lede

On related news about the Sony DRM,

Antivirus companies are going to start detecting it as harmful software:

http://news.com.com/Antivirus+firms+target+Sony+co py+protection/2100-1029_3-5942265.html

The article also has claims from CA that the DRM damages the computer's ability to make rips of ANY CDs including non-copyrighted CDs.

According to Computer Associates, the Sony software makes itself a default media player on a computer after it is installed. The software then reports back the user's Internet address and identifies which CDs are played on that computer. Intentionally or not, the software also seems to damage a computer's ability to "rip" clean copies of MP3s from non-copy protected CDs, the security company said. "It will effectively insert pseudo-random noise into a file so that it becomes less listenable," said Sam Curry, a Computer Associates vice president. "What's disturbing about this is the lack of notice, the lack of consent, and the lack of an easy removal tool."

And the original patch has been replaced by one one third of the size. Mark Russinovich posted new info on the (smaller) patch on his blog showing it causes BSODs in Windows.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=173601122

http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-5940667.html?part =rss&tag=5940667&subj=news

Looks like they are giving away search appliances for free.

Shades of Netscape?

4) Install a DHCP demon on the local server to allocate local IP addresses, DNS and gateway settings. If the desktops are network boot capable then install TFTP to remotely boot and use Knoppix via PXE and the network. If the desktop OS is constantly crashing, or is infected by malware, the user can select PXE/network boot via the BIOS, and boot into Knoppix. The user can then be instructed over the phone to enable the ssh server to allow remote scan,repair and reimaging of the desktop partitions. The user can use the Knoppix desktop to continue working with full access to files while the the remote administrator fixes/reimages the drive in the background.( Consider hiring someone who knows how to customise Knoppix or another live Linux system for your setup )
5) Partition the desktops with as small as required C: partition ( or in the case of Linux the root partition ) for software. When software is install, use dd and netcat via live Knoppix to copy/clone a snapshot of the partition to the server. You can allocate the remaining free space as a persistent partition where documents are stored.
6) Install and enable remote VNC service on all the platforms, but only allow incoming connections from the local server ( which is redirected over a SSH tunnel ).

Serously, someone whould consider hacking a copy of Knoppix or Ubuntu live to work with WINE as a bootable CD for a remote repair service business.

GNU has nothing to do with open source. The GNU Project predates the open source movement by over a decade and started the free software movement, a movement with a different philosophy than the open source movement. RMS has spent a lot of time in his talks and essays explaining that the work he has done for the past two decades was not done in the name of open source.

One particular example of this came up recently. Lots of people miscredit GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, as an "open source" compiler. RMS, the initial author of GCC, has said quite clearly that GCC is a free software compiler. RMS gently but forthrightly corrected CNet.com writer Stephen Shankland on this issue, but Shankland still got it wrong a few months later. Hopefully CNet can bring themselves to mention the phrase "free software" in the proper context as often as they mention "open source" in the proper context.

GNU has nothing to do with open source. The GNU Project predates the open source movement by over a decade and started the free software movement, a movement with a different philosophy than the open source movement. RMS has spent a lot of time in his talks and essays explaining that the work he has done for the past two decades was not done in the name of open source.

One particular example of this came up recently. Lots of people miscredit GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, as an "open source" compiler. RMS, the initial author of GCC, has said quite clearly that GCC is a free software compiler. RMS gently but forthrightly corrected CNet.com writer Stephen Shankland on this issue, but Shankland still got it wrong a few months later. Hopefully CNet can bring themselves to mention the phrase "free software" in the proper context as often as they mention "open source" in the proper context.

I'm a PDA phone user, so links are hard, but here goes:

Anti-competitive

Orbit Act I think

Pirates + Govt Mandates

I have 9 years of history with Inmarsat and Iridium.

While I hold no place in my heart for microsoft. Quicktime appears to be having a very similar problem. But also remember that the libjpeg and libz also had similar problems exploitable on Linux patched in the last year. Expecting an OS, ANY OS to save you is a bigger security threat than some exploitable jpeg code.

I don't understand it either. It sounds from TFA as though he wrote these programs in the normal course of his employment, clearly making the software the property of the company. That he "placed locks on the code and stipulated that Titleserv could run--but not alter--the programs" sounds as though he was attempting to hold the company hostage. Even with some additional information in one of the comments on TFA, it sounds like it was a co-ownership situation, where the company had every right in the world to make modifications as it needed them.

"Other governments also have been applying pressure to ICANN in a last-minute bid to head off .xxx." http://news.com.com/Bush+administration+objects+to +.xxx+domains/2100-1028_3-5833764.html

according to http://news.com.com/High+court+wont+hear+programme rs+appeal/2100-1047_3-5939704.html?tag=cd.top
everything you bought and have a physical copy of is open at least for your own use.

"In both cases, the judges found that Titleserv was not at fault, because under U.S. copyright law, it's legal for people to make changes to software, provided that they own a physical copy of the program, the changes constitute "an essential step in the utilization" of the program, and the software is used "in no other manner.""

Calling it a PHP exploit would be wrong as well. It's an exploit of specific applications written in PHP (AWStats and Drupal from what I could tell).

According to this article, AWStats was patched back in February.

Security Focus eWeek CNet

After oracle 8 its possible to pass in arrays in your PL/SQL using the varray type. Here's a link that shows it in action.

It's time to sell when you start hearing all this "Mac's going to take over" propaganda.

The time to buy would have been when Apple was about to go under 1997.

The bottom line is that Apple is in the fashion business, not the serious computer business. What's iPod to day is walkman tomorrow.

DirecTV would be crazy not to have a new, non-TiVo DVR and not a damn thing will save TiVo, then.

Perhaps partnering with Comcast might do the trick?

No thanks, TiVo. I've been boycotting you since you denied me the right to save my shows as long as I like and forced me to opt-out of a user profiling program into which I never opted.

I will be much happier when Google TV allows me to schedule recordings on my standards-compliant MythTV DVR that I built myself.

this i thought was intresting basicly says as a custumer your screwed. http://news.com.com/Why+they+say+spyware+is+good+f or+you/2010-1071_3-5934150.html

It is a part of the 'owner's manual' included with their SEC filing.

Co-founders release Google 'owner's manual'

Perhaps not so much 'buyer beware' as 'buyer be advised'. Investors know up front what the company is about and Google is not obligated to aggressively pursue short term profits by whatever means for its share holders. It has explicitly told them it will not do that.

1) Where is the profit in letting vendors sell Intel machines with Mac OS X?
Right now for a $1k system they might get $100 profit. If they license OS X for $30, they might get $20 profit (being optimistic here). So if they sold $1.6b Macs last quarter, and have 10% margins (they actually have reported 9.6%), they made $160m; if they license overnight, they'll have to sell 80m copies to make the same amount of profit. Only 177m PCs were shipped last year, so they'd have to take HUGE chunks of the market in order to make a transition profitable.
News article about shipment last year.

So it's not good enough that shipping OS X for Intel is cheaper; it has to be profitable. Microsoft is profitable because they got $30 or so for every PC shipped last year, or $5b in OS licenses last year.

2) Why do they want a bigger share? They only need to make more money, and that doesn't necessarily equate to bigger share. As I outlined about, $100 per PC vs $20 per PC requires an overnight 5x increase in shipment.

If Apple wants to lower prices, they still have lots of things they can do:
a) strip out components: Compare a Mac mini to an XBox 360 or PS3
b) use cheaper components
c) increase process efficiencies

None of those things have anything to do with adopting OS X for Intel en masse.

Does anyone remember when IE 5 employees slapped that 10/12 foot giant "e" on the Netscape campus to proove that they "won" the browser wars...?

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-203835.html?legacy=c net/

It was just a dumb prank that prooved to be a self fullfilling prophesy for a good many years. Maybe this is just the kind of one-up-manship Yahoo needs to make it's employees at least, believe they are actually harder working or more dedicated to their craft.

In any case my allusion above should be enough to show how ridiculous anyone calling themselves the winner in these kinds of battles. IE is hardly superior to most of it's competition these days.

I know you're kidding, but the fact of the matter is that they probably won't. They'll probably just scan for filenames containing a name of a famous artist or band. A threatening letter will be sent automatically, even in cases of non-infringement.

A disclaimer: I am a Unisys employee.

Unisys is definitely making a move towards widespread adoption of Linux (Red Hat and SuSE) as a development platform, and various other open source development tools (eg, Maven, Eclipse, various parts of Apache Commons, etc). Regardless of current marketing hype from Blackmore and McGrath (the CEO), this is very much a bottom-up driven initiative. Open source software is finding itself in an increasing number of Unisys solutions, to the occasional consternation of management. So what you're hearing from the Unisys management publicly now is "hooray, Open Source," but what you would have heard a few years ago was... well, nothing, unless you worked for Unisys, in which case you probably would heard "stay the hell away."

Note: when I say "finding my way into," I don't mean "being stolen." Unisys is being extremely careful as to what the various license requirements are for the things it's using, so developers and architects are cognizant of the implications of the GPL and other similar "sharealike" licenses where their efforts are concerned. My experience with the developers here has been that they are pretty agnostic about everything except efficacy - they just want the stuff to work, and they want to get it done right for as little money as they can spend. I find that to be a healthy attitude.

For a guy like me whose roots are pretty heavily in open software, there's more than a little irony here. You may recall Unisys' spat with the Free Software Foundation, or... well, really a whole bunch of people, including Accuweather, over software patent issues.

One last thing: Peter Blackmore has identified outsourcing as a major component of the Unisys strategy. He's not kidding. Tons of Unisys developers have been axed over the last few years, and much of the development activity has been given to Caritor employees, based either locally at Unisys offices, or in India. The ones I've worked with are good guys, but there's more than a little discomfort between the two groups. Many Unisys folks see his biggest impact on the company as having been the guy who sent Unisys jobs to India.

As with Amazon's existing "Search Inside the Book" feature, only books in the public domain or whose copyright holders have granted permission will be included in the new digital book programs, he [Jeff Bezos] said. That will help the company avoid the copyright concerns Google's project has sparked.

at $150m investment it said
Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said. He added that the company expects to gain a higher percentage of its revenues from software and services in these core markets in the future
and also
Davis also said that given the size of Microsoft, a $150 million commitment amounts to little more than good public relations.

Most cell phones are not really sub-$100 devices.

Are you just saying that, or do you actually _know_ that? Because I would say that the majority of cell phones sold are well below $100 to manufacture. You got to keep in mind that the majority of cell-phones sold are low end phones.

So I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the low end phones cost $25 or less to manufacture. It's very hard to find any information on this but here's a quick thesis:

You can roughly divide the cost of a cell-phone into four parts: display, battery, chipset/electronics, plastic.

The cost of the plastic is going to be negligable, as in a couple dollars at _most_, I think everyone will see that. You can get batteries on eBay (in quantities) for any phone for a few of dollars. You can buy replacement LCDs on eBay (in quantities) for a few dollars (color < $20). Can't find a source for electronics, but based on the price of electronics with similar capabilities/densities, I don't see why it would be more than $10 (minipci 802.11 card for example).

here's an article that talks about cell phone MFG cost, although no current numbers...

and here's a more tangible quote where the person says the BOM can be reduced by 30% to make a $20 phone possible. (which is cost the end-user, not mfg cost)

Your post is misleading. Yes, Apple's units are flat from 2000. What you're not saying is that they're significantly up from 2001-2004, and that they're inches away from eclipsing their 2000 unit sales figure.

Also, Dell's growth has been abnormally high vs. the PC industry as a whole, they're the only one that grew through the downturn. Apple is not really in direct competition with Dell, they have completely different value propositions.

PC Industry unit growth (CY): 1999 = +23%, 2000 = 14.5% , 2001 = -7%, 2002 = -1%, 2003 = +9%, 2004 = +15%, 2005 = (predicted) +0.5%

Apple's unit growth (FY, ending September): 1999 = +25%, 2000 = +32%, 2001 = -32%, 2002 = 0%, 2003 = -3%, 2004 = +9%, 2005 = (predicted) +38%

Apple's unit sales in FY 2000: 4.6 million. FY2001-2004, around 3 million. Apple's unit sales in FY 2005: 4.53 million.

Dell's unit growth in 2005 (FY, end): (predicted) +17%. They grew 50% in 1999 and well over 20% each year through most of the downturn.

Sources: Gartner & IDC stats for 2000, Dell's 10-K filings from FY2001-2005 where they reported their share vs. industry share, Apple's 10-K filings from FY2000-2004, plus their 10-Q from Q3 2005 combined with the Q4 announced figures. and Gartner's 2005 prediction.

A couple of notes: Apple's growth figures tend to lag the industry because they count "last year's" holiday season. Notwithstanding that, Apple's 38% unit jump relative to a flat industry, and nearly double that of Dell for FY 2005, is significant. Does it mean Apple is killing Dell? No! Does it mean that more people are buying Macs? Probably. I find the argument that all those 32% that bought Macs in 2000 are en-masse upgrading this year somewhat implausible. This holiday's figures are going to be very interesting to compare vs. the rest of the industry.

And the article at http://news.com.com/Political+bloggers+jailed%2C+d etained/2100-1028_3-5933917.html?tag=nefd.top/ is yet another perfect example of why there are many other countries who should not have a voice in controling the internet.

As a US citizen I will be among the first to admit we're not perfect. Our current Presidink is a perfect example of mistakes we make. But to my knowledge we don't throw bloggers in jail for criticizing the government.

Steve Jobs wouldn't lie, would he?

Here is the case I remember most. I think I remember a couple of others, but it was a while back and it's a blur.

It's unsavory stuff, to be sure, the guy was taking nude pictures of a 9 year old. But they used the presence of PGP on his computer in the case against him, even though they never said they found any relevant encrypted files.

Lets not forget, Apple would not have made the comback if MS didn't give them $150 million to stay afloat and regroup. Steve Jobs AND Bill Gates really deserve the Tank You from the apple fans.

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

From
Dell: Apple should close shop

To
Dell: We Would License Mac OS X

first of all, this is a good read for anyone interested in the topic. The fact is your can get more out of economies of scale with more expensive hardware that more people want to buy than you can out of getting small runs of cheaper hardware....Not to mention a lot of the poorest parts of the world are landlocked, and that makes shipping a nightmare that will dwarf the cost of the pc....
But more importantly, when you look at the developing world, they are awash in good intentions. Good intentions that actually hurt more than they help because they create a fake economy. Africans don't need people with good intentions telling them what they need and don't need. What they really do need is less corruption in their governments and a more stable geo-political situation, something $100 laptops are not going to help solve. If anyone has a one sentence answer to those problems, book your flight to Oslo now. In the end this will end up being an overpriced failure that will just make a bunch of people feel good about themselves because THEY obviously know more about what poor people need than poor people do....

And we all know what happened to them.

You think that they can afford to hire some lunix rocket surgeon as a computer forensics expert on what the local PD pays?

It's been mentioned that the Mac Mini is likely to receive the new chips first.

SGI for example has done just that in some configurations.
Check http://news.com.com/Photos+SGIs+Columbia+supercomp uter/2009-1039_3-5428431-6.html

There is a post on the EverQuest Live message boards asking for a clarification of the EverQuest Producer's message to the community.

Craig Knapp, the producer of EverQuest, has stated that Sony Online Entertainment has a new tool to ferret out cheaters and "hackers." There is no word yet from Sony as to whether this will be a repeat of the mistakes they made five years ago and of the mistakes that Blizzard is currently making.

Wouldn't it be ironic if you could get around EverQuest's cheat protection mechanism by using Sony's own rootkit?

Yeah, but the definitely aren't supporting Mac. I tried the site with IE 5.2, Safari, and Firefox. Firefox is the only one that displayed the whole page, but did not do so well. It's not too surprising though, they stopped development of IE for Mac.

The New York Times wrote in an editorial this week that "the Internet would become a free-fire zone without any limits on spending.

Seems to me that the NYT has a conflict in this issue too, as the blogs are in competition with the NYT. Keep in mind also - that under current FEC rules any editorial can be considered as an 'in kind contribution' to proponents or opponents of a bill. So the NYT would be wise to watch their back on this one.

What happened to Oracle after the opened their new HQ? Cisco's HQ is hardly "palatial" and that is by design.

More on the new HQ jinx

It's interesting to note that in the mobile web browser space, Nokia has supported or licensed a number of different players. They've licensed Opera for a long time, they've helped fund Minimo (Mozilla/Gecko), and of course they've just announced their own KHTML-based browser.

They seem to recognize that they're better off with choices -- if KHTML works best on one device, maybe Gecko will work best on another. Maybe Opera will be the best choice in another device, but they don't want to be stuck if, say, Opera's licensing deal becomes prohibitive, or Gecko or KHTML goes off in a completely new direction.

"...the antipiracy software itself will not be removed, only exposed to view. Consumers who want to remove the copy-protection software altogether from their machine can contact the company's customer support service for instructions, a Sony BMG representative said."

Yeah, good luck with that.

Apple doesn't own the scroll wheel technology, Synaptics does (http://www.synaptics.com/).

http://news.com.com/2010-1041_3-5375101.html

This is part of the genius of Steve Jobs. He is better then anyone for taking credit for someone else's ideas. Really worse then MS, just doesn't have as big of a company.

Anyways, interestingly enough, according to you, apple's biggest selling point isn't really apples'.

http://news.com.com/Sony+CD+protection+sparks+secu rity+concerns/2100-7355_3-5926657.html?tag=nefd.le de

MS isn't inherenty bad. They have just made more mistakes than others, but that can change.

It can change, but I doubt it's going to.

Microsoft has always been anti-competitive, and has shown a desire to domainate particular markets in any way possible - which is usually via bundling.

This is still going on, as shown here:

"Microsoft's Office Live services also represent a threat to those providing small businesses with e-mail and Web hosting services. Microsoft said that, for free, it will give businesses a domain name, a Web site with 30MB of storage and five Web-based e-mail accounts.

Any number of Web hosting firms, telecommunications companies and Internet service providers could see a chunk of business lost to Microsoft's free offer."