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It's really, really stupid to assume this was done in response to Google. Hell, just google NetDocs and you can see Microsoft's been working on this since 2000:

http://news.com.com/2009-1001-250261.html

Slashdotters have no frickin experience or memory.

I took it for granted that by preload he was referring to prefetch(have a look at the /Windows/prefetch folder). But it is my understanding that prefetch should work the same for OOo as for MS Office.

"Windows Live is a set of Internet-based personal services, such as e-mail, blogging and instant messaging."

According to Microsoft, Instant Messaging is part of the operating system...

I suppose e-mail and blogging will become so, as well, in Vista.

If only there was some other company that tried this before. I wonder how that worked out for them...

If only there was some other company that tried this before. I wonder how that worked out for them...

Why Google was interested in buying up "dark fiber"?

While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?

Perhaps because vservers lack some of the neat features of Xen, such as on-the-fly instance migration and full iptables support?

Furthermore, vservers is, for the foreseeable future, a Linux-only project. So far, NetBSD and Solaris have been ported to Xen, and basic support for FreeBSD as a guest host is available. Once Intel VT and AMD Pacifica are available, Xen will also support Windows XP SP2.

Given just these benefits (and Xen has many more), it's no surprise that Xen appeals to more people and applications.

... to invest in the development of that $100 computer that the MIT is developing (http://news.com.com/The+100+laptop+moves+closer+t o+reality/2100-1044_3-5884683.html)? By the time Wikipedia is printed, it will already be out of date. Maybe investing in cheap internet terminals and a couple of printers would make more sense...

Ernie Ball Case

The Above article may look like FOSS advocacy, but read the reason the company went pro FOSS.

Bill got $100,000 from that suit alone.

Don't get me wrong, I never said Bill was a bad guy.

It's just my $0.02

Googling for Mathew Gilliat-Smith, First 4 Internet's CEO, reveals many articles:

http://news.com.com/New+CD+copy-lock+technology+ne ars+market/2100-1027_3-5492395.html
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121949,0 0.asp
http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/digital_r ights_management/

They claim to the press that their software will not damage or criple computers. Oops. The PCWorld article pretty clearly explains the extent to which First 4 Internet's product controls the number of copies you make.

And do you REALLY think SBC is gonna let the unbundling happen without a fight? Doesn't matter what the Telecom Act of 1996 mandated, SBC and telcos like it are gonna lobby and fight it tooth and nail:

http://news.com.com/FCC+unplugs+states+rules+on++n aked+DSL/2100-1034_3-5637790.html

How much SBC lobbying do you think went into THAT decision?

Apple's customers are like no others -- a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing. ... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active, exploratory, avant-garde and early adopters. The activities they enjoy are unique in the the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows users.

-- MetaFacts, Inc.

With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]

-- Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by C|NET)

Will the free version of Oracle be subject ot the same weak Oracle password encryption scheme that the commercial version is?

I've duplicated a number of techniques in the SANS article to make me leery of password security on my Oracle machines.

Not DRM that the iPod can read. Apple's DRM can only be used by ITMS, they have refused to licence it to third parties. Weren't they trying to legislate against Rhapsody (or something like that?) for selling DRMed content that the iPod could play?

Yes, that would be Real Networks, which owns Rhapsody. Real apparently reverse-engineered Apple's FairPlay DRM without licensing it from Apple (because Apple wouldn't license it to them), and Apple wasn't happy.

rely on closed source management tools like Yast

Yast has been GPL for a while now. Here's a news.com.com.com.com.bork.bork.bork article from March 2004 about it.

Hint: another name for a compulsory passport is an "identity card". These are things you get in places called "police states", of which a notable example is a place called "France"

Or, perhaps, the United States. Or were you living under a rock when the Real ID act passed? Well, just in case, here's a CNet FAQ on the topic.

It's 2005 because it was developed during 2005?

Developed in 2005?

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1656883,00.as p
http://news.com.com/The+long+road+to+Yukon/2100-10 12_3-5129900.html

SQL Server 2005, previously codenamed Yukon, is about two years behind schedule.

Just one sidenote: These morons that run Slashdot really blow me away. I hardly think I'm the only one, but I put in a submission just after the RTM yesterday with more information, that was worded better, that was more accurate, and that had several interesting historical links. It was REJECTED before the submission they accepted was even submitted (how do I know that? Because the submission referenced some lame blog post that happened about 11 hours after the release, after anyone who actually cares for this sort of info had heard it from someone who heard it from someone [repeat that about 7 times]).

Am I bitter? Absolutely - These morons seem to just randomly pick and choose their tripe stories. When one carefully crafts a submission to do the job that these clowns are too incapable of doing, to know that they're rolling dice between swigs of Jägermeister. And then, for the people dumb enough to actually rely on Slashdot for any sort of info (there might be a few left), they get to hear it a day or more later. Timely!

One of the many ways MS infects their own stuff. heheh

This story was rejected by /. in under 3 minutes.

Newest MS Critical Update protects XP from own users.

news.com is reporting that a new Microsoft Critical update that was "released Tuesday to fix four Windows flaws, including one that experts predict will be exploited by a worm in the coming days", may also inadverntly protect PC's from their own users.

According to the article: " Installing the patch can cause serious problems, Microsoft said in an advisory posted to its Web site Friday. The patch could lock users out of their PC, prevent the Windows Firewall from starting, block certain applications from running or installing, and empty the network connections folder, among other things, the software maker said."

But there is assurance in the article: "Even if users experience PC trouble after installing the patch, they will still be protected against any attack exploiting the Windows flaw". What they fail to tell you that your PC is now also protected from you being able to log in. If this is the result of stuff they know about, how reliable are their predictions about upcoming worms? (Maybe they are the ones releasing the worm)

This type of protection is much easier to to in linux, nothing to install, just log in as root and type rm -rf /
----

I still can't figure out how /. picks their stories.
Maybe they looked at it and rejected it because, it has proper grammar and spelling, is timely, and is not a dupe. Maybe I should start submitting stories in l33t sp34k.

I did a simple google search (piracy in south Korea) and found the following interesting articles. I may be wrong, but it does look like S. Korea is known for a major amount of piracy And is my opinion that we (United States) are no way as close to the piracy in other countries like South Korea as we tend to fear repercussions and law suits more then other countries do...

http://www.mpaa.org/PiracyFactSheets/PiracyFactShe etSouthKorea.pdf

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117907504?catego ryid=1009&cs=1

Piracy losses (US$ millions) $27 million
Seizures (all items) 231,514
Piracy level (Video & Optical Disc) 25%

"Piracy has been on the rebound in South Korea since the economic downturn in 2001 and 2002. Historically, piracy of high quality, counterfeit videocassettes has been the most prevalent in the market. However, in 2003, there has been a significant increase in the number of DVD imports and optical disc burner operations in South Korea. In addition, duplication facilities of videocassette plants and now burner labs have become larger, more secretive and more sophisticated with technology. This signals a shift from the historical trend where piracy duplication facilities had small and medium capacity.

South Korea's cat-and-mouse with piracy

"With a piracy rate of 40 percent to 50 percent, according to various estimates, South Korea has become one of the hot spots for cracking down on illegal software."

Again I may be wrong but it seems that your statement is unfounded. - Cheers!

Totally breaks the mood when a comedian has to explain his punchline. Anyways...

For those who need to be informed and don't understand the humor, please see widely circulated story "Forgive me, Father, for I have blogged":
http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-5918217.html

Excerpt from article: "Several Catholic high schools have banned their students from posting personal information about themselves or their schools, according to a report by the Associated Press. The ban, which one school's principal says has been in effect for five years but is only now being strictly enforced, requires students to cease participating in social networking sites like MySpace.com, where many young people post personal information, photos and blog entries--and it even applies to information students post from their home computers. School officials say the policy was instituted to protect students from online predators."

With 1024 processors per rack, and does that mean you only have access to 128 processors? Or only 1/8 of all of the Blue Gene racks? Not very much of a savings, considering 128mil for all the racks, excluding costs for other equipment and not to mention tax.

But it was paid for by the US government.

Yes, because we all know Google never blocks anyone. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963132.html

I think that deleting entries in specific Google sites only relevant to certain countries with laws prohibiting such entries isn't quite the same as deleting a link to the competition..

Besides, if you're going to open that can of worms it seems like you'd point out the massive China filters, but those apply to Microsoft too, don't they? I wonder if Microsoft also deletes entries for racist sites in Germany and France where it's prohibited (or seemingly at least strongly discouraged by the governments)?

IMHO, there are different visions on what MS does with computer/internet apps versus what Google does. Google tries to improve people's life by adding "non-usual" - i.e., "innovatory" functions - on it's products. Example: the flight dates thing that was announced today (http://news.com.com/Google+flight+search+takes+of f/2100-1038_3-5917821.html?tag=nefd.top). I may not live in USA, but I don't recall seeing a similar tool online (SIMPLE, fast and user-friendly to use, not those complicated planners with ). Microsoft's plan is (almost) always to CREATE new tools that DON'T INNOVATE, just allows you to make the same thing in different ways (even being easier). What I mean is that Microsoft COPIES good ideas, but doesn't have creative people to THINK how a human can use the computer to make everyday tasks easier (in a SIMPLE way), that's the basic difference.

From CNN.com:

"All your base are belong to Google"

Full story: http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-5917178.html

Yes, because we all know Google never blocks anyone. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963132.html

Which carrier was it and where did you hear about this?

For landline or cells? For cells it was widely reported that they had serious issues during the blackout. The few tower sites with backup power were buried because of the traffic caused by the other sites going offline.

For landline my experiences were all local. I would assume that in larger cities they already have generators at the central offices. Around these parts (upstate NY) in a lot of the smaller villages and towns all they have is battery backup. The point that I was making was that they called crews in and deployed generators to those locations before the battery backup failed. The Blackout caused zero interruption of POTS service in almost all cases.

Contrast that with the cellular providers. I'd quote some Nextel PHB from the article I linked, "We need electricity to power our cell sites, but when you don't have that, it's out of our control" I guess Nextel has never heard of a generator.

You're talking about the prefetch feature. It's part of Windows XP, not Office. It speeds up all applications, not just Office.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5165773.h tml

Mattias

Grove network is not in anyway an example of the business models that the article proposes. Its actually Ozzie's addition to microsoft.

Quoted from "Microsoft to offer book search":

"Principally and philosophically, we are aligning with the notion that intellectual property should not be proprietarily owned by any commercial company," Tiedt (MSN manager) said.

Well, actually they have their own plans.
and part of the plan is giving some for free! See SQL Server 2005 Express Edition's Pricing Policy and the same for Visual Studio Express Edition which will be free.
I don't do much open-source programming but I'd like to thank all those guys who do, cuz if it was not for their efforts, M$ would have never given something for free (at least as in beer!!)
Anyway, the point is that some small businesses might be attracted to M$'s side by giving these development tools for free and this might have an effect on Apache and as a whole LAMP's market share.

And BTW, that 'big dumb company' bit? PWC is owned by IBM. Did you know? No, of course you didn't. And this article covers something that happened at a minor PWC Japan subsidiary. PWC is a BIG IBM/Windows shop, as most of the consulting firms. I though that 'OMG the domain controller was dying so I had to dump Windows' bit a little hard to swallow.

But anyway, I really think I'd enjoy reading slashdot if it wasn't for you ignorant folk.

(posting anon because by profile has a link to my homepage with my resume and I was too lazy to edit it)

A spending measure approved on Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee will boost the number of H-1B visas for highly skilled guest workers by about half--from 65,000 to 95,000.

Not to raise your blood pressure, but you are still at risk of a BSA audit. Consider what happened to Ernie Ball.

If they audit you, they not only will insist that you prove that you paid for the software, but if you can't prove it they will nail you with penalties. And it will be cheaper to just pay them than to fight them.

Maybe if your bosses read that story they will let you go ahead and do the changeout before things fall over.

Good luck.

You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.

Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.

Good luck!

Apple's customers are like no others -- a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing. ... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active, exploratory, avant-garde and early adopters. The activities they enjoy are unique in the the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows users.

-- MetaFacts, Inc.

With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]

-- Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by C|NET)

If you're speaking of sites like allofmp3.com, please specify your sources or at least link to some evidence that the operation is anything but legal. It is my understanding that monetary compensation is given to the respective author for each download under the copyright laws currently in effect in that country.

AllofMP3.com has songs which have never been authorized for internet distribution by any site -- for example, The Beatles have never signed on with iTunes, Napster, or any other online service. The copyright holders are still waiting to see how things play out. But their entire song catalog is available at allofmp3.com.

Even the Russian cops admit this place is illegal.

The Russian site claimed it had licenses to do so from a local clearing house, but record labels have maintained that the licenses weren't valid. After long-standing complaints, the Moscow City Police Computer Crimes division completed an investigation earlier this month and recommended that prosecutors charge the site's operators with criminal copyright infringement.

Hmmm, KK grapichs look comparable to anything available right now on PC, IMHO. Or worse.

One reason why businesses are alarmed is the lengthy list of suggestions that have been advanced by nations participating in the U.N. process. Those include new mandates for "consumer protection," the power to tax domain names to pay for "universal access," and folding the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) into a U.N. agency. The United Nations has previously suggested creating an international tax bureaucracy and once floated the idea of taxing e-mail, saying in a report that a 1 cent tax on 100 messages would be "negligible."

They have never sued any companies for using Linux.

Wrong.

Perhaps the red screen of death? Muahahahahaha!

http://news.com.com/2061-10805_3-5703006.html

Apple's customers are like no others -- a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing. ... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active, exploratory, avant-garde and early adopters. The activities they enjoy are unique in the the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows users.

-- MetaFacts, Inc.

With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]

-- Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by C|NET)

"And cost of media
and hardware will very clearly favor HD-DVD - as I said, those
numbers (over $1 billion for BluRay start-up vs about S90
million for HD-DVD, total, are what's out there now)."

http://news.com.com/5208-1041-0.html?forumID=1&thr eadID=10077&messageID=73332&start=-174

They were basing their information from this article:

"Is Blu-ray really superior?
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has long asserted that its Blu-ray (BD) format is superior to the rival HD DVD format, and BD's "revolutionary" buzz has understandably caught the fancy of certain technologists. But CEOs should be wary, because what the BDA does not sufficiently address is what lies behind those assertions. The numbers are stark: manufacturing BD discs will require an estimated US$1.7 million cost per manufacturing line. Per line!

Then, each major manufacturing facility would require the implementation of a minimum of two mastering systems, at a minimum cost of US$2 million per system. DVD, at the height of its success, resulted in an estimated 600 manufacturing lines globally. Even allowing for a decline in systems costs over time as the manufacturing base expanded, the tab for radically overhauling the media manufacturing industry would approach a billion dollars worldwide or more. Already-beleaguered CFOs will be challenged to raise--and risk--this significant amount of capital.

Compare this to the estimated cost of retooling for the HD DVD format compared to BD. HD DVD is able to utilize virtually the entire existing manufacturing infrastructure. The cost of upgrading an existing DVD line is about US$150,000--less than a tenth the cost of a BD line. A DVD mastering system can be upgraded for US$145,000. Basically, HD DVD is a DVD-9--a version of DVD we have enormous manufacturing experience with already--with a denser pit structure."

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/ne xt-gen-dvd.ars

The software maker will compete 'the good old-fashioned way, with innovation,' he said.

Ah yes!! The company who gave us these jewels of knowledge.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-997868.html

"By standardizing on one operating system and using other Microsoft software, the JetBlue CIO says he cut the company's technical staff by 50 percent." - sounds like a dynamic and exciting place to work in IT

"When I joined the company in January 2000 and from my inception as VP and CIO in April 2000, I standardized on the Windows platform. I chose to do that because I felt from the server platform all the way out to the desktop and back that to have one type of operating system and to be able to train one type of technician" - pure genius!

"We don't have any Unix; we don't have an AS/400; we don't have any mainframes--we don't have anything outside of Windows." - yeah... we get it from the above already.

Sounds like a blast to work there...I bet their IT people can wait to get to work, heck they probably have to push them out the building at night and lock the doors so they can't come back in and start working again until the morning.

Zend Technologies expanded its board of directors with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Guarav Dhillon, who was founder and CEO of data integration software maker Informatica. Zend makes development tools for the open-source language PHP.

Full article

I'm sure that being a director of Zend Technologies does not make him biased in any way.

Indeed. Not only that, your DVD player will have to have a JVM on board.

Fuck that

http://news.com.com/IBM+tries+server+approach+to+P C+business/2100-1010_3-5900930.html?tag=nefd.top It seems VMWare is getting a move on.

I was wondering if I was living under a rock since I never heard of quake4?

Turns out Raven software made the port and modified the doom3 engine. For the older slashdoters who remember doom1 and doom2, raven developed heretic and then hexan on the doom1 and doom2 engines and added multiplayer capability. I forgot all about these guys.

A full review and screenshots are here. I find it pecuilar that Raven ported this classic level of quake3 to quake4. ... or commonly known as the level where the cheaters with auto-aim and the rail gun whip your butt in.:-)

but someone might find it useful.

There's a transcript of the session here.

And as mentioned in the article:
A copy of the entire 45 minute interview can be downloaded (it's 21 MB) by clicking here.

The question in the article can be found 27 minutes and 13 seconds into the audio file.

And interestingly enough Ballmer was asked the following (at: 2:37)
"I have a question for Mr. Ballmer. If you attempt to thwart Google with your acquisition of the ???????*. How many chairs will Business Week report you as thrown?"

He responded with:
"I've never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."

* I couldn't hear what was said, if anybody knows reply to this post.