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Do you think that if anyone created a successful data haven now (Sealand is not really successful), they would end up being invaded by the major powers for supporting terrorism?

what rock have u been hiding under?

worm stalks Linux machines

they have such a tight os cause the environment is so tight. they control all the hardware.

Hey douchebag, you do realize that Dells, compaqs, and apple machines are made in the same factory, out of the same parts, don't you?

The only real difference is the fancy plastic bits on the outside, and the processor (which, again, isn't Apple, it's from IBM).

Can be found here. I recommend them highly.

Be sure to note the insanity that is Pac-Pix and this screenshot.

Also click here to see videos of Mario 64-DS and Metroid Hunters in action.

Says CNET in http://news.com.com/Millions+of+Dell+power+adapter s+recalled/2100-1041_3-5403129.html

I have a Canon F60 and I am most pleased.
Here's a review.
It's huge, but I print rarely and it has not shown any sign of clogging whatsoever so far. And the ink is cheap and CMYK in four separate cartridges. Has a compact flash reader too.
I was so happy to dispose of my Lexmark POS. Their cartridges are expensive and clog immediately. I will never ever give Lexmark another cent again.

Not exactly. Read news.com.com
"Microsoft has software called .Net that's similar to Java. However, the software giant, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, has licensed Kodak's patents, Lanzillo said. "

From this link here
It states "Microsoft has software called .Net that's similar to Java. However, the software giant, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, has licensed Kodak's patents, Lanzillo said".

IBM, MS and HP are safe.

According to news.com.com, it looks like Kodak is getting $92M out of Sun. Who's next?

Lots of ISPs use Apache, because it's free, easier to configure in a scripted fashion, and generally all around more suitable for a hosting setup.

I also understand that any survey that counts domains is going to be heavily skewed by the big domain name registries that have default parking pages. Every once in a while an article comes up on News.com that mentions this. (1, 2)

Lots of ISPs use Apache, because it's free, easier to configure in a scripted fashion, and generally all around more suitable for a hosting setup.

I also understand that any survey that counts domains is going to be heavily skewed by the big domain name registries that have default parking pages. Every once in a while an article comes up on News.com that mentions this. (1, 2)

• Google search
• CNN
• CNET
• MacWorld
• Computer World
• The Register

That means if Kerry wins, p2p per se will not have legal problems during the next administration like it was tried to be banned in this one?

Yeah. It's not like any large websites use php. I was at a PHP conference about two weeks ago, where Rasmus Lerdorf (the lead developer, who happens to work at Yahoo now) was talking about their infrastructure. He didn't give an exact number, but said it was in the area of 10,000 servers (running FreeBSD), and handles literally billions of hits a day.

It's too bad it doesn't scale: once they get 10 billion hits a day they'll probably have to rewrite and switch to .NET or something.

but good luck convincing a large financial institution to use PHP on their giant web apps.

The only problem here is reputation. Microsoft pushes .NET as a large enterprise system, same thing with Sun and Java. No one really pushes PHP, besides people that use it.

There's no reason PHP can't be used to write "enterprise" applications from a technical standpoint. I think the problem comes from the fact that generally schools teach Java, because it was hip during dot com, and .NET, because Microsoft gives them lots of free software when they do. When all your developers - espessially the lead developers and CIO's making language and platform decisions - are trained on a certain platform, that's what they'll choose.

I'd really like to hear the reason you don't think PHP is scalable, or why you don't think it's suited (a technial reason, not by reputation), but to be honest, I don't think you'll be able to give me one because by the way you talk, my guess is the only thing you know about PHP is what you've heard from other people and/or companies who sell a product that competes.

PHP runs on basically every platform (instant cost savings vs .NET). It can connect to any major DBMS. It runs on a ton of web servers, most importantly Apache. It's lightweight, has probably the lowest learning curve of any language (read: your designers can use it), easily extensible with C, and it's open source (so you never have vendor lock-in, and you're never stuck with a problem that can't be solved).

I use PHP for lots of my stuff, and it saves me money and allows me to do things a lot faster than if I was using another language. I don't care if you agree or not, because it doesn't really affect me in the end. It's a competitive advantage for my company - I don't have the overhead of paying extra thousands of dollars per sever for licences, for one thing.

The bills come at a time when the music and movie industries are exerting enormous pressure on all branches of government at the federal and state levels to crack down on P2P content piracy. The industries also are pushing to portray P2P networks as dens of terrorists, child pornographers and criminals -- a strategy that would make it more palatable for politicians to pass laws against products that are very popular with their constituents.

There's also increased enforcement activity. The US Department of Justice released this announcementearlier this year. According to this article possessing obscene material is legal but not distributing it:

Under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly possess or distribute child pornography. It generally is legal to possess "obscene" materials--defined by the U.S. Supreme Court as sexually explicit materials lacking scientific, literary, artistic or political value--but illegal to distribute them. Magazines such as Hustler or Penthouse are typically not considered obscene, but legal standards vary from state to state.

Law enforcement are ramping up their efforts and soon enough folks will find that distributing GBs of hardcore material is not just illegal but might earn them a visit to the pokey where their music sharing friends can visit them after paying their settlement.

The bills come at a time when the music and movie industries are exerting enormous pressure on all branches of government at the federal and state levels to crack down on P2P content piracy. The industries also are pushing to portray P2P networks as dens of terrorists, child pornographers and criminals -- a strategy that would make it more palatable for politicians to pass laws against products that are very popular with their constituents.

There's also increased enforcement activity. The US Department of Justice released this announcementearlier this year. According to this article possessing obscene material is legal but not distributing it:

Under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly possess or distribute child pornography. It generally is legal to possess "obscene" materials--defined by the U.S. Supreme Court as sexually explicit materials lacking scientific, literary, artistic or political value--but illegal to distribute them. Magazines such as Hustler or Penthouse are typically not considered obscene, but legal standards vary from state to state.

Law enforcement are ramping up their efforts and soon enough folks will find that distributing GBs of hardcore material is not just illegal but might earn them a visit to the pokey where their music sharing friends can visit them after paying their settlement.

Just in case anyone didn't see this as satire....

MPAA mistakes various free code in small zip files (all under 64k) as the movie "Basic" and television serial "Alias")
http://www.scene.org/showforum.php?forum=5&topic=4 0047

MPAA mistakes a file manager for X windows as X-Files movie based on television series.
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/09/dmca _iselfhelpi.html

ESA mistakes "INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip" as Pac Mac video game.
http://gauley.ucs.indiana.edu/~cshields/dmca_lette r

RIAA accuses Penn State's Peter Usher of pirating music by rap band "Usher".
http://news.com.com/RIAA+apologizes+for+threatenin g+letter/2100-1025_3-1001095.html

RIAA admitts to "several dozens more additional errors" but won't disclose details. No direct link to Cnet coverage on May 13, 2003.
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/20030926_unsafe_harbors. php#_edn2

Diebold intentionally files false takedown notice to silence (very well deserved) criticism of its shoddly voting machines:
http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/001465. php

Cult of Scientology attempts (yet again) to shut down xenu.net, which exposes embarrasing truths about their documents made public in a court case:
http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/2003/02/04/1 044497702-DMCA_Takedown_Notice_Scientology_and_Pac Bell.shtml

Apparant con artist David Waathiq attempts to use DMCA threat to shut down critical website:
http://mdwaathiq.worldwidewarning.net/DMCA.aspx

.

To be fair, many of these aren't the MPAA (though at least the 2nd one is)... but there is definately a pattern of abuse. These are just the ones I found in 5-10 minutes of searching. It's quite likely there are many more out there, and many that go utterly unreported.

Perhaps we could have a moment for his Pop who passed away last month
http://www.ernieball.com/newscontent.php?item=2004 0910_ern.html

Followed by the story of how the Microsoft(BSA) does business. (AKA look who switched to linux)
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=l h

Sterling ball knows that you don't disrespect people that you do business with.

ATT is doing a study. That means that free software is obviously good enough to replace M$.

According to this article at News.com, it was "Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a vocal libertarian who frequently says the federal government should not be policing the Internet, was the lone dissenter."

"Couldn't the same thing be said for a company who buys, say, 100 licenses for MSOffice, then only uses 50 of them."

Or indeed, $97 ,000,000 of Oracle licenses that aren't needed...

A CNet article had specific power details on the 130nm Athlon 64 and 90 nm Pentium 4:

"The 3800+ chip consumes 91 watts of power at idle, rising to 172 watts under a full load. That compares with 155 watts at idle and 258 watts under a full load for the Pentium 4 560."

The lower power consumption of the AMD parts arises from their lower clock frequency, as well as from AMD's use of silicon-on-insulator technology.

It's not clear if Cool n Quiet was used, but it shows the much better power utilization in existing AMD processors over Intel, even though Intel was giving a long talk about how important power usage was at IDF.

Paul

A CNet article had specific power details on the 130nm Athlon 64 and 90 nm Pentium 4:

"The 3800+ chip consumes 91 watts of power at idle, rising to 172 watts under a full load. That compares with 155 watts at idle and 258 watts under a full load for the Pentium 4 560."

The lower power consumption of the AMD parts arises from their lower clock frequency, as well as from AMD's use of silicon-on-insulator technology.

It's not clear if Cool n Quiet was used, but it shows the much better power utilization in existing AMD processors over Intel, even though Intel was giving a long talk about how important power usage was at IDF.

Paul

Try RFID Implants. You can get the sensors at radio shack and the implants themselves are real cheap if you go through your veterinarian.

5,206,951
Issued: April 27, 1993
Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types

5,421,012
Issued: May 30, 1995
Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types

5,226,161
Issued: July 6, 1993
Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types.

The abstract is the same for all three:

An object based data processing system including an extensible set of object types and a corresponding set of "object managers" wherein each object manager is a program for operating with the data stored in a corresponding type of object. The object managers in general support at least a standard set of operations. Any program can effect performance of these standard operations on objects of any type by making an "invocation" request. In response to an invocation request, object management services (which are available to all object managers) identifies and invokes an object manager that is suitable for performing the requested operation on the specified type of data. A mechanism is provided for linking data from one object into another object. A object catalog includes both information about objects and about links between objects. Data interchange services are provided for communicating data between objects of different types, using a set of standard data interchange formats. A matchmaker facility permits two processes that are to cooperate in a data interchange operation identify each other and to identify data formats they have in common. A facility is provided for managing shared data "resources". Customized versions of resources can be created and co-exist with standard resources. A resource retrieval function determines whether a customized or a standard resource is to be returned in response to each request for a resource.

According to this C|Net story, the patent numbers are 5,206,951, 5,421,012 and 5,226,161. There are links to the patents at C|Net.

From News.com, contains links to the three Wang patents that Kodak now owns.

• 5,206,951
• 5,421,012
• 5,226,161

Also, this article seems to have more detail on how the case started.

To answer your question, Patents:
5,206,951
5,226,161
5,421,012
Kodak bought the patents from Wang Laboratories.
My source

The concept of using high-level instructions encoded by as bytes isn't new. P-code was one of the early virtual machine systems.

Kodak's profits have been declining from it's traditionally strong consumer products (home photography) as users switch to digital photography, and so now they are looking for earnings through patent lawsuits. Kodak layed off 1700 staff a couple of years ago, and were planning another 20 per cent reduction at the start of the year. More or less the same situation as SCO.

Given that many image processing companies (Quantel) have become dependent on Java for the programmable aspect of their custom hardware and Kodak wants to focus on digital processing, this is going to become another Infineon/Hyundai/Micron Technology Rambus shoot-out.

I have a friend working at google, and all she got was a lousy tee-shirt....

i wonder how many of these windows "lite" versions that are sold to asia & russia, are destined for pirated software?

why on earth would you buy a machine with linux if you are going to install pirated windows over it ? why don't you just buy a machine with no os?

>It would be interesting to know where these numbers
>come from (on both sides of this argument), and, how
>they can possibly be verified.

The numbers are just statistics. all the machines that are sold can potentially be used with pirated software, it simply makes no difference whether you put linux on it or not. If 90% of linux machines are used with pirated windows, it can propably be shown that 90% of all machines ever sold are used with pirated software, be it a newer version of windows or pirated office etc.

but i wouldn't worry about this study: this is really just a little something to give to the shareholders when the expected next years' financial results come out. (yeah, we lost some marketshare and income this year but we are still a monopoly don't worry about a thing .. )

It's interesting to note, however, that a lot of the decisions were built upon Blizzard's stating that a person can take the software home, read the EULA, reject it, then take it back to the store for a refund within 30 days. I didn't see anywhere pointed out that you won't actually GET a refund in the real world. So Blizzard offers a "way out" of the one-sided contract that cannot actually be used.

Hopefully the appeal will point this out, in which case I think most of the other rulings won't have a leg to stand on, since Blizzard now has $50 of the customer's money, and the customer is left with nothing they case use (without giving up a bunch of rights).

There was a lawsuit about a year and a half ago in California regarding this very issue - naming MS, Symantec, and others. It basically said that you were being forced to buy software that you cannot return after opening without seeing a EULA that you are forced to agree to in order to use the software. I haven't seen any updates, so it may have been settled out of court.

This ruling CANNOT be allowed to stand. It's WORSE that UCITA. It's so one-sided, it makes one wonder whether the judge was really impartial on this one.

http://news.com.com/Music+sharing+doesn't+kill+CD+ sales,+study+says/2100-1027_3-5181562.html

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision
No more Hewlett Packard name
No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.

If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.

No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.

Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.

Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.

I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.

In this article Sony says that they are working hard to bring MP3 devices to market but they have nothing to announce at this time.

Gartner's point is that Linux on the server hasn't brought Linux to the desktop in anything like the numbers enthusiasts have claimed. Ian Smith of the UK's National Computing Centre has been saying pretty much the same thing. Desktop replacement is the most important IT activity in the UK, with 42% of Windows systems to be upgraded over the next two years, mostly to Win XP. Linux has had no impact whatever. Upgrades, HR costs squeeze British tech budgets

I really don't see what all the fuss is about.

Did anyone else read that as "ornithological frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)" at first, or is it just me?

Here is another NewsImages.com http://www.newsimages.com.com/

In Change the Law I point out that while the Constitution allows for Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Copyright could be repealed tomorrow if we could get enough votes in Congress to do so.

If you don't think this could happen, consider that there are more Americans sharing files via peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000.

In my article I detail a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. My suggestions are that you:

• Speak Out
• Vote
• Write to Your Elected Representatives
• Donate Money to Political Campaigns
• Support Campaign Finance Reform
• Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Practice Civil Disobedience

If you're a US citizen and 18 years of age or over, you can vote in November. But to do that, you must be registered to vote in your state. The voter registration deadline for most states is just a few days away, October 2nd for most states. So register today! Rock the Vote can help you with registration.

If you're a US citizen residing in a foreign country like me (I live in Canada), you can register to vote with the form you can obtain from the Federal Voting Assistance Program. You can register to vote in the last state you resided in in the US. But again, your registration must be received by your state by the deadline, so either express your application, or fax it, if a fax number is available.

(If you've never lived in the US, but one of your parents was a US citizen, then you're a US citizen too and you can register in the last state your parent resided in.)

If you want to make a campaign donation, a good choice would be Representative Rick Boucher. Rick Boucher has worked tirelessly for copyright reform, as you can see from his article Time to rewrite the DMCA.

Speaking of which, the American Conservative Union joined the effort against the Induce Act.

The American Conservative Union (ACU), which holds influential Republican activists and former senators on its board of directors, is running newspaper and magazine advertisements that take a humorous jab at the so-called Induce Act--and slams some conservative politicians for supporting it.

"This is the Hollywood liberals trying to crush innovation," said ACU deputy director Stacie Rumenap. "What's sad is that they've got Republicans on their side." A Senate committee vote on the bill is scheduled for Thursday.

All the more reason to get as many people as possible using strong encryption *now*. Once use of encryption by rote becomes widespread (mainstream) there is no way it can be stopped. People in the US will NOT put up with the government having "backdoors" to their private communications. They've tried to get this before and the outrage was just too overwhelming - even without a critical mass of users.

The NSA made a strong push in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and even then, with Americans all panicky over terrorist attacks, they could not get support for this kind of thing (check out the news on this proposal).

"VOTE IN NOVEMBER AND PUT AN END TO THIS HORSESHIT."

... you can at least try. AFAIK, the only presidential candidate likely to loosen the screws is Bandarik, and he's not doing well in the polls.

Well, IANAL, but WHEREAS:

• as others have pointed out, this claim is almost certainly not original with Mr. Florian Muller but rather comes from OSRM; and
• therefore the claim is not "Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents", but rather "Linux potentially violates 283 patents, none of which have been tested in court"; and
• U.S. software patents are just so much toilet paper until they are tested in court, and approximately half fail the test;

Points of interest from the OSRM news story: In the U.S., you apparently cannot be penalized for infringing on a software patent if you didn't know about it. Thus Linus recommends to all Linux engineers not to investigate any potential patent infringements, for legal safety. For this reason, OSRM is not releasing the list of its 283 patents, so it is futile to ask Florian or the OSRM what they are. Those who wish to know what the patents are will have to do their own research - but remember that doing this research exposes the researcher to legal liability in case of infringement!

The number 283 presumably refers to the 283 patents identified by Open Source Risk Management (OSRM) as potentially being infringed by Linux. Then again, I don't believe they have revealed which 283 patents they are talking about either.

For more details, see http://news.com.com/Group:+Linux+potentially+infri nges+283+patents/2100-7344_3-5291403.html

Slashdotters, this is a very important discussion (the one on software patents), but let's start with accurate facts.

The 283 thing is old news and was just repeated by Mr Florian Müller (who is NOT a MySQL developer). See here:

http://news.com.com/Group:+Linux+potentially+infri nges+283+patents/2100-7344_3-5291403.html

I quote from that article:

- - -

Linux potentially infringes 283 patents, including 27 held by Microsoft but none that have been validated by court judgments, according to a group that sells insurance to protect those using or selling Linux against intellectual-property litigation.

Dan Ravicher, founder and executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, conducted the analysis for Open Source Risk Management. OSRM is like an insurance company, selling legal protection against Linux copyright-infringement claims. It plans to expand the program to patent protections.

- - -

So it seems that an important discussion has got onto the wrong track due to incorrect input information.

But let us discuss software patents! MySQL's official position can be found here:
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/patents.html

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

"I haven't seen so many Microsoft fan-boys since..."

c|net.

m.m.

I wish this were true, but unfortunatelly it isn't. More and more communities are outlawing upskirt pictures using privacy laws as their defense, despite the fact that the photographers are going to public places (outdoor restaraunts, etc taking pictures of subject wearing miniskirts who aren't very careful sitting down and standing up, etc).

Earlier this year, even the feds have started passing bills to outlaw this

(so if you wear a miniskirt and stand on your head, are these NASA sattelites violating the federal privacy laws?)

According to some old Slashdot stories, wireless computing seems to be proliferating but isn't profitable and Intel had been looking into makeing chips that use cellular networks for wireless connectivity, which would have to come with a fee. Crippling the Wifi networking at the consumer level and steering them towards using cellular networks would be more agreeable to and supported by established industries.

However, like the story says "The company may still develop a custom chipset to re-enable the WiFi functionality if a large customer requests it". This may be in response to Sun's research into using wireless connections between processors to create a supercomputer, as part of a DARPA funded program. Intel would undoubtedly want to maintain it's dominance in the processor market, and would want to enable that sort of functionality in its own processors. Anyone building a supercomputer requiring a large number of wireless processors could be considered a "large customer" that "requests it".

I don't know how Intel's current processor WiFi capabilities compare to Sun's implementation of wireless connections between processors, but if Intel maintains this approach to the integration of wireless technology in its processors as they develop it, then it would ensure its participation at both the consumer level and in large-scale supercomputer projects.