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*points to the words "hard-drive based" in the parent post

While we're being pedantic (you know full well that Apple had a winner on its hands, and that many companies, as soon as they saw it, immediately wanted to release a copycat product), the first hard-drive based MP3 player was supposedly the Remote Solutions Portable Jukebox PJB-100. Though it doesn't matter, because my essential point still stands... the iPod, via feats of marketing / UI design / whatever, was something cool that everybody wanted to have and/or have one of their own to sell. Apple could have super-hyped it before release, but they didn't.

(then again, apple didn't really need start-up VC funding like a new company does, but still, I assert my point still stands, that most people's gut feeling is that if people are really hyping a product really hard, long before release, it's most likely a bad sign. and that gut feeling is a justified one)

Considering these investors think it is wise to invest in broadband over powerline (BPL), you have to wonder about how competent they are at picking technologies in which to invest.

And why not? You can print stamps, after all.

Paypal and the like are fine for pure electronic transactions, but being able to issue your own checks/currency on paper that you could take down to some storefront vendor and have them punch in your name and 20 digit number (or read it from the bar code) would make everyone happy (except VISA and its member banks who exert monopoly like control over the transaction fees).

I would guess the biggest problems with setting up a personal line of credit system based on public key cryptography and 3rd party certificates from anyone who wanted to be a banker are not technical problems, but rather political problems with intruding onto someone else's existing scheme for making money.

Sure, you can be a bank if you comply with these 48 lb books of barriers to entry , er, I mean, regulations to protect the consumer. (Yes, it's an oversimplification, but there's plenty of margin for profit in tailored industry regulations as the FDA evidences.)

Anyone who has paid 18% credit card interest ( or even 5% on a mortgage) and gotten paid 1.2 % on their bank balances knows there's got to be some slack built into that system.

No plans to do so?

hmmm whats all this about?

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-244438.html?legacy=c net

seems to me they have plans, they just dont feel enough idiots use linux yet to bother.

according to this article, you can get a PC from HP with decent performance for as low as $250? 1 option includes Athlon 3000+, 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, Win XP home, integrated video and sound, and a keyboard and mouse.

Does their cost cutting measures allow them to sell cheaper pcs? Is support for these machines going to suffer?

Sure, CEOs should make more then the average workers at a corporation but exactly at what gross multiple of average salary wages is too much for a CEO to be making?

It has been shown that european CEOs salrays are often a much smaller multiple of median workers salaries I recall. BusinessWeek, which has tracked executive pay for half a century, figures that CEOs of the country's largest corporations last year (2003) were paid about 300 times the average factory worker. In Europe, in contrast, chief executive pay tops out at 30 times the average worker. Americans might defend this disparity by declaring that U.S. companies are better run, but are these companies more than 10 times better run?

Additionally according to Kevin J. Murphy, E. Morgan Stanley Chair in Business Administration, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California: 'Since 1970, cash compensation for CEOs has gone from 25 times the pay of the average worker to about 90 times the pay of the average worker. Total compensation, including stock options measured at grant value, went from just over 25 times average worker pay in 1970 to a peak of almost 600 times average worker pay in 2000, and has now (2004) dropped down to about 360 times average worker pay.'

I dont know about you but I have to say I am sure that being a CEO is a hard job and requires a variety of skills and risks to be taken, but it is not such a specialized set of skills that warrants 600:1 pay disparity I think. Yes, capitalism exists to reward those who take the greatest risk but if you are a CEO making multi-millions a year regardless of company performance all one needs to do is survive for a few years and then then bail out on your disgustingly obscene Golden Parachute(tm) and be set for life while the company you leave lay in ruins and the common worker gets the shaft.

At least thats how I see it in the light of what that bitch Carly did to Hewlett-Packard (oh, and dont call it HP, then your parodying Carly's attempt to make everyone forget how Walter Hewlett spoke out against the merger between Companq and Hewlett-Packard http://news.com.com/2100-1001-858499.html?legacy=c net )

Oh, yes, you're right. Amazon should do exactly what IBM is doing to defend against SCO. Oh wait, they are.

Amazon may actually be in violation of Cendant's patents. If you think that Cendant's patents are obvious bullshit, then do you think that Amazon should cheerily take it on the chin, or do you think they should fight back?

This is quite possibly very different than the SCO case. It would appear that SCO has little legal ground to stand on, let alone moral ground. So, IBM might very well be effective in asking the suit be dropped. If you believe that business practice patents are bullshit (I do), then you probably believe that Cendant doesn't have moral grounds to sue Amazon, but they may very well have legal grounds. That makes the defense very, very different.

Rob

iTunes is more popular than LimeWire.

iStudy: iTunes more popular than many P2P sites

Chances are there will eventually be more legitimate traffic than illegitimate. Now, I'm not saying the illegitimate market will shrink -- I'm saying that online content will grow, and legit means of content distro will eventually grow faster than pirate means.

http://news.com.com/2100-1016-999371.html

So what happened to all of the "line-by-line" copying? C'mon Darl, it's either there or it isn't. You yourself said there is "line-by-line" copying of code. But now there is no "literal" copying of code, only obfuscated code.

Or does "line-by-line" somehow equate to something other than "literal"?

Yeah, but Gator's not spyware. Take it up with chick from Doubleclick, who now serves as HomeSec's Chief Privacy Officer.

Since we're now talking about a security position, can any of you Microsofties tell us if the guy who came up with Internet Explorer's zone-based security architecture is the same guy as the one who came up with the idea of integrating the web browser into the desktop? Because if they're the same person, I think we know who the cybersecurity czar's gonna be.

Seeing how a spyware company executive is appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's privacy advisory board, I think you can guess the answer.

Lines from Unix's source code have been copied into the heart of Linux, sometimes exactly and sometimes in a modified form designed to disguise their origin, according to SCO Group Chief Executive Darl McBride.

"We're finding...cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code."

I'd rather whine about the content creators that want to have it this way...

This wouldn't be an issue if we didn't have paranoid movie companies.

Personally, I think it's a matter of who's developing the support -- just like Longhorn will indirectly support movie piracy like Windows XP does by not preventing it, it will supporting this technology. If Microsoft wouldn't, the movie companies would probably develop software for it instead.

Actually, just like Linus isn't against DRM in Linux, I bet he doesn't have problems with this support becoming a part of the Linux kernel in the future either, which is actually just another one in the long line of DRM technologies. At least I can't see a reason to why he with his stance of allowing anyone to use Linux for anything you want to, including watching protected content, would change that stance now.

Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender, Craig Spiezle, a director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker said Wednesday

Reading the rest of it, I just don't see where the deleting comes in. Even if they put it with the bulk mail it's still there for an extended period of time. The worst thing that could happen is people have a few things marked as spam and let them sit around in there to be deleted. They can leave Hotmail and go to Yahoo.

Not only stolen code, but infringing code as well.

but windows 2003 is pretty rock solid.
Riight. Like this?
Go on, pull the other one. Windows is just as leaky as it's ever been.

" It's funny how people think. Since neither product is 100% secure, they both think they're equally insecure. This logic is as stupid as saying "reading slashdot is just as dangerous as motorcycle racing, because I could get hit by meteor and die either way". Clearly one of the products has more serious exploits than the other and has caused more loss to businesses, but some people just don't want to admint that."

How do you conclude Windows has more serious flaws than Linux. I've seen no evidence to support that claim. In fact a major security flaw in Kerberos was just announced (that isn't in the MS version). Your post is just anti-MS FUD

A company spends a large amount of money developing a technology like this

Eh? A bit of school lab glassware and a green balloon?

I'm not defending anyone here, but I am setting the record straight because the parent is full of bull. "Remeber [sic] Cringely famously posted in 1998 that the iMac launch was going to fail." Nowhere did Cringely say in his article that the iMac launch was doomed. Here, read the whole article that the parent conveniently neglected to link. Heck, even in the quote the parent used, there's nothing about lack of demand, or the souring of consumer opinion, only concerns about initial supply. "We didn't see stories about them because it was all bull." The parent has a short memory. Anyone paying attention to Apple knew about their supply problems. Here's an article I found in 30 seconds by using Google titled "Supply problems persist for Apple" from C|Net, dated November 4, 1999. You want a complaint from 1998? Here's another that mentions, you guessed it, supply problems. "The biggest problem with the weekend festivities, as you can imagine, was that there were not enough iMacs to go around." More supply problems.

According to this, people are already exploiting the JView profiler bug and have been playing around with ways to exploit the color management module bug.

So has Microsoft retracted their stand on Open Source being a a cancer? They can't possibly stick to that story, specially after so many organizations are seeing the benefits of Open Source. Will MS really and their fanboys ever learn?

Replying to my own post, this article http://news.com.com/An+energy-conscious+wireless+t echnology/2100-1039_3-5778423.html?part=rss&tag=57 78423&subj=news answers that question and a lot more. (Beware the extraneous spaces slashcode sticks into the link.)

Why laptops? Why not desktops with LCD monitors?
Laptops are not designed for long hours of operation. See this article
I am the guy the article is talking about.
I know how painful it is.

Will the seating be egonomic?
Will the students be educated in healthy computing?

These questions need to be answered before jumping to the use of laptops instead of text books, or else we will have hundreds of 10 yr olds with painful hands and necks.

Microsoft, FTC reach privacy settlement

And, given that this was not the only incident that MS abused customer information or lied to people about what or why they were collecting data, I'd rather not trust them with access to my personal information. You do not need to give away bank numbers to cause great harm.

InnerWeb

From Gates turns over reins of his empire:
Gates, 44, said he will remain as chairman and fill a new post created for himself: chief software architect.

and this on a day when news(.com*) has a peice titled: A safe browser? No longer in the lexicon.

Gator, er, Claria, is not spyware.

Gator CPO at the Department of Homeland Security.

D. Reed Freeman, the "Chief Privacy Officer" of Claria Networks (formerly Gator), the creators of the pervasive spyware package GAIN, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee"

Legitimized by Microsoft and with representation on HomeSec DPIAC, Gator is now officially securityware, Citizen!

And if you've got some sort of problem with that, take it up with the boss, namely HomeSec's Chief Privacy Officer. She's none other than Nuala O'Connor-Kelly, formerly of Doubleclick.

What's with the head-on-desk-thumping motion? I'm not demented enough to make this shit up!

How about maps of the addresses of patent holders? Like cancer clusters...

You mean Bill's house? Honestly, who aims for 3000 patents in one year? ...

I'm a linux fan, but what bothers me is that the Linux community is so full of fanatics who can't even see linuxe's weeknesses. Linux is way behind other distros and has a lot of catching up to do before it will come even close to the major server vendors - HP/UX, AIX, and Solaris have had mature NUMA, real kernel threads, and virtualization implementations years before they even alphaed in linux.

BTW, of all the unices aside from linux, solaris is definitely the most comfortable and most open. I don't understand why linux zealots bash solaris: take a look at AIX or HP/UX and you know immediately what I mean. Sun is definitely the "good guy" in the Unix world.

I imagine the survey will look a lot different next year if things keep going the way they are. The article below talks about a company out in California looking for a programmer at $15/hour.

http://news.com.com/2061-10788_3-5770608.html?
ta g=ubind.bld

June 30, 2005 3:26 PM PDT
Coding for $15 an hour?
Could a computer coding job paying just $15 per hour signal something's wrong with the tech world?

That relatively measly amount is what's promised in an ad for a "ASP.NET Programmer" on the America's Job Bank site. The job, which calls for "at least 1 year's experience either in school, at work, or a combination of the two," is being offered by employment services company AppleOne, according to the ad.

Here is a better article about the USF problem... Google finds all... Time to fire up that letter writing campaign asking that the USF program be killed and not expanded.

Um, 40% of the USF is marked for the E-Rate program which is littered with mismangement and fraud. The LAST thing they need is more money.
CNet had an article a while back about it.

What are the limits of conventional computing?

Well right now the limits of chess computing seems to be this Hydra cluster

Is it time to retire the "Beowulf" cliché?

Mod this guy up. I was about to say the same thing.
See here.
However, this probably only applies to internet-over-cable connections; VoIP, DSL, high-speed wireless, T1, OC-n lines and others might face the tax. However, would cable USERS face the tax since the cable OWNERS won't?

In 1996 and 2002

Do you have any sources to back up your assertions? I know very little about real-time java, but a quick google search turns up articles like this one (dated 2 days ago), which suggest that Java's real time support is fairly immature.

Funny this came today, when I noticed in the "Daily Buzz" over at CNET that AMD's ad against intel that came out and reads: "Intel's illegal actions hurt consumers--everyday." Looks like even the big corporation ad execs could use a little grammar lesson. http://news.com.com/AMD+takes+antitrust+case+to+th e+masses/2100-7341_3-5768046.html?tag=cnetfd.buzz

Infrared uses a different part of the spectrum; you're thinking of thermal imaging. Taken from this article, this is how the Contactless Palm Vein Authentication System works:
"It works using infrared light to scan for hemoglobin, which provides oxygen to cells in the body, the company said. Reduced hemoglobin absorbs near-infrared rays, so on the image it shows up as black, with the rest of the hand colored white."

There is a pretty interesting sample image in the article too.

"One of the basic premises of the Xbox is to put the power in the hands of the artist," Blackley said, which is why Xbox developers "are achieving a level of visual detail you really get in 'Toy Story.'"

Fortunately, according to Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft is about to put the rocket scientists who do AJAX programming out of work when they release their new AJAX development platform, so there will be plenty looking for Postfix admin jobs.

Getting $2 billion dollars from Microsoft is helping to keep them afloat. I doubt it is any co-incidence that they basically dropped further development of JDS after they made that deal.

"The strategy has changed slightly." ...now we survive due to the colaboration with Microsoft, so see...they're not a big fan of Linux..and considering they've been taking people away from using our wonderful OS..err...we don't either...

"Google has plenty of ridiculous patents"

Here, let me finish the sentence... ", but I can't take the time or make the effort to prove it."

You know as much about Google's tactics as Tom Cruise knows about psychology... ZERO.

The parent asked for examples, give 'em some!

http://www.seoguide.org/se-patents-papers.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1024-986204.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum34/618.htm

MOD PARENT UP. Excellent comment.

Intel began self-destructing several years ago. For example, in my opinion, the Intel consumer products division released lame, unfinished products. Eventually Intel reacted to the poor sales by closing the division.

Like really, really scary horror stories? Here's one more scary than you've ever seen in film. Intel marketing has become detached from reality. Intel marketing people go to work every day, but they just pretend to have meaningful jobs and pretend to be doing something positive for Intel. They are zombies, and most of them don't appear intelligent enough to know that they are zombies. If you think this is an exaggeration, read this sentence from a recent email message from Intel Marketing (I'm talking here about Intel marketing, not Intel's advertising agency.):

"Pass any three of the four tests before July 26, 2005 and your company will get a certificate of completion - plus you'll receive an Intel BunnyPeople Character." Here's an explanation with photo: Intel Bunny People.

Intel has been giving those dolls away for 7 1/2 years. Maybe someone bought a huge number of them?

How many technically-oriented people are motivated by the idea of receiving a doll? It goes like this: 1) Give Intel marketing your company's address and phone number and email address, so that they can spam you in the future. 2) Sit through boring marketing-speak, written by people who don't know or care about Intel products, or any technical product. 3) Take a test. 4) Get a doll?

Intel management appears to have spun out of control. Apparently it is now all stock options and company politics, and nothing about actually doing well. The people in charge don't actually know what they are doing, and apparently care more about having their executive positions than making good products.

Intel is known in Portland, Oregon, where it is based, for being abusive toward its employees. I'm guessing that the present problems really began about 12 or 15 years ago, when the Intel management, just before an enormous increase in profits, pleaded broke and reduced the pay of employees by 10%. Intel is known for over-working its employees, and pressing them to work very long hours.

Once about 2 years ago, I decided to ask Intel marketing people to fix a problem with the motherboard web site. Intel's ordering model number, used when you place an order with a distributor, was nowhere connected on the web site with the marketing model number, like 845BGL. I asked them to fix that. I talked to several marketing employees, all of whom clearly did not intend to do any real work.

I could tell many, many stories about Intel's sink into depression, but that's enough for now. I will have to say, however, that Microsoft's marketing people are worse.

In 2001 Intel dumped their surplus in Japan and gained some market share that way. Another thing driving the figures is the number of chips in the X-Box. Personally I am surprised by these numbers since I do prefer Intel but find the price range and functionality of AMD to be more appealing to my budget.

BadApple Plug-in for iTunes Podcasts

At some point, Apple is going to add explicit support for podcasts to iTunes. Podcasts are really only long, often dull sound files, the 21st century equivalent of talk radio on cassette. Still, it's a fad, and since iTunes lets you look you for streaming broadcasts, why not podcasts, too? At least, so think the anonymous folks behind BadFruit, an outfit that just released the BadApple iTunes plug-in, ironically for the Windows version of iTunes only. The plug-in adds another link, called Podcasts, to the main iTunes window. Click on the link and you get a list of podcast categories. Drill down to download specific podcasts in iTunes and use them as you would any other iTunes sound file. BadApple claims to be pre-emptive insurance against any potential limitations Apple may place on the podcasts it may offer in future versions of iTunes. CNET speculates that MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, who now has a new site called MP3Tunes.com, is the anonymous author of BadFruit.
BadFruit: http://www.badfruit.com/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5754227.html
MP3Tunes.com: http://www.mp3tunes.com/

I was under the impression Morpheus was at this stage a repackaged version of the GPLed "Gnucleus" program. At least, they were using this strategy at one stage.

Sun still doesn't "get" open source. Check out this interview on news.com with Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO.

We have a strategy that's very different from everybody else's, and it's community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in all our new literature. It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space.

The oxymoron appears to have gone unnoticed. But it makes it very clear that Sun is still all about proprietary stuff. They might share it, but they still own it. And that's straight from the horse's mouth.

Picture 1
Picture 2
Quite neat concept.

Picture 1
Picture 2
Quite neat concept.