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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.

One of the reasons Solaris is slower than Linux is because it checks everything. It is one extremely anal system, and it never ever goes down.

No contest indeed; Solaris kicks the shit out of Linux.

I disagree. I would say that Linux and Solaris in terms of stability are about equal and both _very_ stable. Using the "latest and greatest" of both OSes is not recommended. There have been some issues with Solaris on Sun's lower end servers with IDE drives where the IDE driver was buggy and it would cause the system to freeze. I havn't had a production Linux system crash unexpectedly in over 6 years or so. And Linux does a pretty damn good job of "checking everything" as well. I've had Linux systems stay running with 1 of 2 processors frozen, and I've seen Linux carry on with about every hardware failure possible, and when Linux has found one of these hardware failures, it reports it, and keeps running as much as it can.

I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right) we're going to be looking at some pretty amazing code. Some of the best hackers ever have hacked that thing.

Hmm, I guess you havn't heard about solaris going open source.

I would say that all of the big kernel hackers are pretty damn good, beit AIX, *BSD, Solaris, or Linux. Although Linux is the baby of the bunch, they are all proven systems. I've worked with all of them. They all have plusses and minuses, and they are all pretty slick.

Yet another piece of evidence that CNET's opinion page is populated entirely by stark raving morons.

Better still would have been a software option to turn this machine into a full Wi-Fi access point: Intel's Grantsdale chipset already promises this functionality for PC owners.

He was already wrong on the first count (Apple has already included this software for the last 4 years or so), now this makes him two for two!

Compatibility, that really is the key here. But don't assume devices are compatible just because they are supposed to be! People are reporting very bad compatibility among dual layer DVD writers.

2 years ago the chinese government was censoring alta-vista:

http://news.com.com/China+blocks+search+engine+Alt aVista/2100-1023_3-957154.html/

If this is the kind of choice that google is looking at, it is no wonder that Google is acting like a good chinese citizen.

John Kerry debated that ordinary Americans should not be allowed to use data encryption. His opponent in the debate - John Ashcroft.

Take from this what you want.

I hope I am wrong, I like Sun and I want to see them continue to survive, but I don't see that happening. I don't know first hand, about Sun's HW or Solaris, but from what I read, it seems that they had excellent engineering and great products. But now, they seem to be throwing their fists at everyone. How can such a company, that was so highly thought of, act like such a cornered rat?

Within the last 1-1/2 years or so, it's been hard to tell where Sun stands. Bill Joy no longer works for Sun. With the cancellation of UltraSPARC V and joint venture of between Sun and Fujitsu (here) and from this AMD news link, can anyone say "HP and Itanium". Sun's talent pool has gotten considerably smaller and now management is scared, so they play the FUD card. Anyone really surprised? Management has watered down the talent, taken the Darl Mcbride school of business 101 class and is hanging on to Uncle Bill's pants hoping to catch a crumb or 2, by bashing GNU/Linux - oops- I mean Red Hat and taking on IBM.

To all you anti-IBMers, if you've read the "fists" link above, you'll catch that Sun is porting Solaris to the POWER architecture (guess it ain't that bad after all).

From the News.com.com article:

Sun Microsystems seeks to avoid oblivion by pursuing a simple but powerful strategy.

Was I the only one that assumed the author was going to tell me that Sun had rolled a warrior and put all its stat points into strength after reading that headline? Or perhaps had found a powerful ring that had increased its skill and given it an advantage over its opponents?

Me thinks the author has been watching too much made for TV fantasy..

This is definitely true, I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone. The first I saw of it was on News.com.com.com on the 20th, two days before the ZDNet UK article. It was based on a telephone conversation with Jonathan Schwartz. Sun wants to find a way to avoid commoditization of software, and to make their HW/SW bundle inseparable. That HW/SW bundle doesn't include Linux, at least any moreso than they have to pay lip service to Linux support.

I'm sorry, did you actually think Sun was an ally? I guess it was their $2 billion deal with Microsoft to try to face IBM head-on (the only company whose Linux support has actually lived up to their promises) that convinced you Sun was completely benign.

The real story here should be that Microsoft seems to be completely gutting all the "new features" of Longhorn by either pushing them into XP SP2+, delaying or scrapping them all together! So now that Longhorn is mearly a shadow of its former self, really what reason will anyone have to upgrade to it? Well, now you'll need at least XP just to get updates.

Same shit, different day...

Here is an article from C|Net about people who are doing that very thing. The novelty factor of using a cell phone from 1985 is almost as long as the battery life would be for one of those phones. After that, you are just stuck with 10lbs of digital obscurity and some brain tumors to boot.

http://news.com.com/From+storage,+a+new+fashion/21 00-1041_3-5378415.html Same article? i dont know, but sounds similar (and no reg required)

C|Net is carrying the same NYT story here.

The beauty of 'the system'. Its wonderful how to corporate America has turned the radio into the worthless crap that it is. Although it is 'ours' LPFM is the closest thing the average person can get to having a station and even that requires you be a 501.3c, have at least a couple thousand dollars for a certified broadcasting studio, AND have applied in the extremly tiny window provided for us a few years back. And really who applied for this option when it happened? Fucking religious groups all across the country who already have a very tiny portion of the spectrum to their incoherent babbling. Meanwhile, ClearChannel owns the rest. Thanks guys. A serious movement needs to occur to take back our airwaves, topple the power wielded over us by the FCC.

This is also why media conglomerates want to make cable and satellite your primary avenue for enterntainment. Since they own those avenues. Own and control. I will never buy a satellite dish and i will never buy cable. I dont need them and i dont want them. KILL YOUR TV. Next step after this, the internet...

You're speaking of this as if it were a long time ago. Yet you are also saying that you were trying to get service from an Apple retail store, which have only been around for a few years now and which don't do any in house service. The very first Apple retail location has only been around since May of 2001.

It's an interesting story, but I just have to question the veracity of it. As far as I can recall, Apple hasn't made their own external floppy drives since they made them for the Apple II and early Macintoshes, if that's what you are referring to then it would be way out of warranty. That and the "beige boxes" that you refer to had internal floppies, the internals were discontinued back in 1999, just a bit after all the colorful machines started being produced.

Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.

The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.

That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.

Original post follows:

2004-09-22 16:20:39 Sony to Support MP3 (Index,Music) (rejected)

CNet/ZDNet reports that Sony has confirmed 'it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players,' reversing its previous strategy of native support for its proprietary ATRAC music file format only. Currently, MP3 files must be converted into ATRAC format to listen to them on Sony music players. MP3 support will be included on upcoming flash memory-based players, with a decision on hard drive based music players to come later, but there's no word if the Sony Connect music store will offer anything but ATRAC-encoded music. The strategy reversal is seen as a way to compete with Apple's dominant iPod, which supports both MP3 and its own proprietary Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. The story was originally reported by ZDNet France (French) reporters Christophe Guillemin and Pierre Labousset. The move comes on the heels of an IDC study that projects a $58 billion MP3 player market by 2008, with the greatest growth coming from flash memory players (press release).

Sony supports MP3 on its CD products, but not in its best digital products which is what most people think of when it comes to MP3/music players.

The real story here is shift in business strategy. Sony was the king of portable music after the introduction of the Walkman, but has seen its share slip. It seems that someone at Sony has realized that using a closed, proprietary standard and forcing customers to listen to their music collections how Sony wants them to quickly turns them into ex-customers.

That is big news for Sony. The Sony PSP is coming and Sony has decided to introduce yet another proprietary standard: the Universal Media Disc, which will be hardly universal if Sony is the only one that uses it.

Original post follows:

2004-09-22 16:20:39 Sony to Support MP3 (Index,Music) (rejected)

CNet/ZDNet reports that Sony has confirmed 'it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players,' reversing its previous strategy of native support for its proprietary ATRAC music file format only. Currently, MP3 files must be converted into ATRAC format to listen to them on Sony music players. MP3 support will be included on upcoming flash memory-based players, with a decision on hard drive based music players to come later, but there's no word if the Sony Connect music store will offer anything but ATRAC-encoded music. The strategy reversal is seen as a way to compete with Apple's dominant iPod, which supports both MP3 and its own proprietary Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. The story was originally reported by ZDNet France (French) reporters Christophe Guillemin and Pierre Labousset. The move comes on the heels of an IDC study that projects a $58 billion MP3 player market by 2008, with the greatest growth coming from flash memory players (press release).

OK, so maybe my tinfoil hat is wrapped on a little bit too tightly...

But isn't it strange to put this story side by side with CNET's interview of Professor James Foley's warning about too few people going into computer science related studies.

Of course, the professor has a vested interest in increasing the number of CS students and also in getting more research funding for CS projects - which is to be expected given where his bread is buttered.

He does make good points about the long term consequences of turning out fewer CS grads per capita than other countries, and about how younger researchers deserve a chance to do independent research without laboring as indentured post-docs under the wing of less creative mentors.

But trying to encourage more students to go into CS and IT right now is not necessarily as good a plan as trying to improve the education level of future CS students that are only 0-10 years old right now.

"Given the significant amount of user action required to execute an attack, Microsoft does not consider this to be a high risk for customers," a company representative said, adding that the software giant's security experts are continuing to research the issue.

Seems like only yesterday that Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.4 billion and said they'd "provide a selection of programming including business events, full-length CDs, and audio books." We all knew Yahoo was going to kill off the conventional media companies like ABC, NBC, and CBS - just a matter of time.

Now Apple and the recording companies under the same pressure. Wow, that's gotta be scary. I sure wouldn't want to be in Steve Jobs' shoes knowing that the same minds behind the Yahoo/Broadcast.com integration are now coming after my customers. I don't know how I'd sleep at night.

IBM would want to say they lost control of their German subsidiaries. That's clearly false. Thomas Watson and the New York office micromanaged every aspect of their subsidiaries in Europe and especially in Germany, their most profitable foreign operation. The New York office was aware of all uses for their machines in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933 until about the fall of 1941, two years after World War II started.

Remember, IBM custom-designed the machines, custom-designed the applications and custom-printed the punch cards. There were no universal punch cards or machine wiring. Programs to identify Jews, Jewish bank accounts, barrels of oil, Luftwaffe flights, welfare payments, train schedules into camps, and even the concentration camp information--all these had to be tailored for each application.

The following business reasons might explain why they are releasing the Nintedo DS in North America first:

2004-09-21 09:42:51 Nintendo DS to Launch in N. America Nov. 21 @ $150 (Index,Games) (rejected)

John Markoff at the New York Times (mirror at CNet) reports that the Nintendo DS handheld game system will launch in North America on Nov. 21 with a retail price of almost $150. Apparently Nintendo hopes to avoid a direct sales confrontation with the Sony PSP, which will launch in Japan later this year. However, Walmart still lists availability of the Nintendo DS Platinum on Nov. 30 for $199.82. The retailer was probably caught unaware since Nintendo published its press release on BusinessWire at 1:30 AM Eastern Time.

Apologies for the cross-post but it seems relevant here.

Here's a bunch of links to the New York Times/ CNet, our games pages and the Walmart site which lists some differing information in a rejected post from VERY early this morning:

2004-09-21 09:42:51 Nintendo DS to Launch in N. America Nov. 21 @ $150 (Index,Games) (rejected)

John Markoff at the New York Times (mirror at CNet) reports that the Nintendo DS handheld game system will launch in North America on Nov. 21 with a retail price of almost $150. Apparently Nintendo hopes to avoid a direct sales confrontation with the Sony PSP, which will launch in Japan later this year. However, Walmart still lists availability of the Nintendo DS Platinum on Nov. 30 for $199.82. The retailer was probably caught unaware since Nintendo published its press release on BusinessWire at 1:30 AM Eastern Time.

Pic of it is here

Cloudscape Inc was founded in 1996 and acquired by Informix Corp in september 1999. IBM got Cloudscape in 2000 when it bought Informix.

question. What MS competitor beat MS at anything ever?
Let's see. MS gets beat all the time. They leave markets all time. For example, they opened a development office to create sports games. They recently closed it and laid off all the developers due to market pressure and the fact they got creamed again and again by EA.

Link.

That's one example. MS gets beat all the time. You are just blinded by some kind of myopic paranonia that causes you to think you know everything there is to know about MS. You don't.
MS destroys companies.
OF course they do. That's point of competition. I am in business. I intend to destroy every competitor I can.

If it does not destroy them outright it leaves them crippled.
Again, thats the point of business. Survival of the fitest.

It also loves to sign partnership agreements and then backstabs their "friends" by stealing their technologies and customers.
Yes, and any friend who signs a deal with MS should know that. You to fail to mention times MS has been beaten at strategic partnerships. Of course that foils your little myopic vision of MS as the source of evil. Go research Eolas and Veritas and see how each got MS for over $500 million.

The DOJ could not stop them and I doubt anything short of a nuclear bomb in redmond would.
The DOJ can't stop them because they settled the only case they have against MS. And when the settlement expires next year, MS will be completely free to operate however it wants in terms of monopoly. Any new charges will have to be retried from scratch.

I don't think that CNET qualifies as a "weblog." This one probably wouldn't be considered one, either...

...a slightly larger roundup. xServe is supposedly the best bang for the buck when it comes to big cluster servers. How about: P4-, AMD-, G5-Linux roundup?

Of course it doesn't represent exactly 1 million new users.

However: Downloads are increasing, hits from Mozilla at various websites are increasing (For example c-net with now 18% Mozilla) so there is definitely a trend here.

Mozilla no longer can be ignored which will mean the few IE-only sites that still exist will disappear and we all (but especially web developers) will be enjoy a return of advancements in browsers. (Even IE users will benefit because Microsoft can no longer ignore Mozilla either)

The odds of WU getting hacked are pretty slim as surely Microsoft concentrates all its security efforts there

Sure, I'd trust them...

No-one is beyond reach....

Had a blurb on this....Apparently it brings porn to your searches.....

For example, if you search "Frontpage SEO", pr0n shows up in the image toolbar....I've seen it, but haven't played around with it much.....

Link to the story
http://news.com.com/2061-1032-5371766.html?tag=xtr a.ml/

Read the subject line - no one said "anti linux", it's an "anti IBM axis".

Q: IBM is obviously a big competitor, if not the biggest one, for both companies. Is this going to put pressure on IBM?

Ballmer: Yes.

McNealy: We wouldn't have done it if it didn't.

So yes, I'll agree that it is typical Groklaw-style info - well researched and informative. :)

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems set aside their punching gloves on Friday, agreeing to a 10-year deal that will see the two companies collaborating on a variety of topics and Microsoft forking over $1.6 billion to its longtime rival.

Q: IBM is obviously a big competitor, if not the biggest one, for both companies. Is this going to put pressure on IBM?

Ballmer: Yes.

McNealy: We wouldn't have done it if it didn't.

...

Q: Did you, Scott, basically buy yourself a key to the inside of the hair ball (McNealy's derisive term for Microsoft's proprietary software), or do we actually have some new openness that is going to make it easier for other companies?

McNealy: Where we use their intellectual property, there will be a royalty stream. Where they use ours, there will be a royalty stream back.

Ballmer: For guys like us, who have valuable intellectual property and a desire to provide jobs, it's not always just a question of what's available there to be integrated. It's really a question of, "Is there appropriate compensation for the investment we've made?" We think, now, that we have a framework. Whereas it relates to Sun and StarOffice and Solaris and Java, we've got what's fair and proper, and Scott obviously thinks that he's got the same from us. Not only today, but it's a framework that goes out 10 years and gives us the ability to continue the cooperation.

My apologies to Jonathan, who as you pointed out wasn't mentioned - perhaps it's Scott who got the big payoff. :)

Maxtor and Linksys are teaming up to push a device that will enable an external USB hard drive to connect to a wireless router.

Also, this story

Netgear's new WGT634U Wireless Media Router has a little something extra that we expect will be standard on all of these things sooner or later: a USB 2.0 port for attaching an external hard drive that anyone on the network can access. Plus they've cut a deal with Western Digital (sort of like Linksys' arrangement with Maxtor) to hook people up with drives that can used with this thing, though almost any external drive will work (even a lot of those Flash keychain drives) and they've even prepared a list of which ones are compatible.

plenty of these things seem to be out there, check them out.

I recently attended a web seminar (webinar) Novell hosted about SuSe Enterprise Server 9 security. They talked a lot about the security certificaitons Suse has been awarded, and how even Micrososft has not been granted the highest level of security for it's 2003 server line. They then presented a poll for the attendees, "Which is more secure open source, proprietary, or a combination of open and proprietary software"? As predicted the combination response won. I think the correct answer to which is more secure Open Source or Closed Source depends totally on what programs are being discussed and where they are applied. Remember just because the source is open doesn't mean it's audited and the people that find security holes necessarily want to fix them. With great power comes great responsibility, as Stan Lee so wisely put.

Novell said in an internal study they found that open source tends to be more secure in popular applicaitons, so Apache is more secure then IIS (as if we needed them to tell us that!), but they found out that in obscure programs proprietary tended to be more secure. This is probably the main idea behinds Novell's recently annouced both source stance. Granted they have financial reasons for not wanting to open source parts of their product line, but this rational does seem logical. Though it would offend the stallmanites.

One other thing that's come up more over the last 12 months is this notion of indemnification [against patent and copyright claims].

Yes I wonder who is making it an issue.

More and more customers are asking us, "Help me understand what you do from an indemnification perspective versus HP or IBM or Red Hat or Novell." That's weighing into decisions more and more. ...

Yes because again Microsoft are trying to tie people down with fear that what they will touch they will loose again because the big Microsoft guys will spoil thier fun.

Customers began introducing it and asking me about it more than I was introducing it to them. And I began to say, "Wow. We really stand behind our technology in a pretty aggressive way.

Hahahah yes you are plenty aggressive, like a cornered animal, even the Ministry of Truth could learn from you guys.

We should make sure that we get credit for that compared to Linux in many ways." And it's actually been something that tips the scales sometimes when people are on the fence.

Is that the barbed wire elecrified fence of 10 year supply deal, licensing terms, special backhanders, propriatary formats et al.

Lets all hug this guy. Anyone notice how Microsoft are finding security holes in its own software right when it wants you to upgrade?

Or go to http://news.com.com/Google+recruits+eggheads+with+ mystery+billboard/2100-1023_3-5263941.html?tag=nef d.pop2004-07-1310:33:02

This is at least the second time google has done this. The first was on a billboard along US 101 in Silicon valley. /. may have covered it then, but I can't find the article so here is one from news.com (note that the caption to the picture if you read the NPR article also references the same billboard.)

Legal fight-fight-fight!

Now that's entertainment!

Mono's license change -- Makes it easier for Novell to sell an "Enterprise" edition ..... As more and more apps developed by "commercial" FreeSoftware companies go BSD licensed ... there's a shaky future somewhere around there.

Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors with open-source browsers jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, up from 8 percent in January.

That's quite a jump.

Apple computers did catch fire actually, back in 2001.

Does this count?

It was the SCO puppetmaster that said the GPL is viral.

Users who have already downloaded Microsoft's recent security update, Service Pack 2, are not affected.

Let's hope this works out better than Yahoo's last digital media acquisition. I wonder if Musicmatch's CEO is looking to star in a reality show ...

Now, real Mac ISVs like Adobe, Wolfram, Stone Design, they're actually active and timely with updates.

Interesting that you include Adobe as a real Mac ISV. I think the Apple-Adobe relationship is a perfect example of the difficulties of being a Mac ISV, particularly for media software companies such as Adobe (and Real).

Notice that Adobe has dropped Premiere for Mac. Why did they do that? There are two reasons: First, like it or not, Windows has become an acceptable platform for digital video work, which makes it an important market for Adobe. Second, Apple decided to compete head-to-head with Premiere by developing the Final Cut Pro product. Perhaps they felt the need to do this to further differentiate the Mac from their PC competition once Premiere ran on both platforms, but the net result is that Apple pushed a top-tier ISV off their platform by shoving in to an already small Mac software market.

Being successful as a Mac ISV comes down to one thing: Can you sell enough high-margin software in the relatively small Mac desktop segment to cover your development costs and make a profit? Adobe Premiere is a very expensive, high margin product, and yet they abandoned the Mac after Apple started competing with them. Who wants to compete head-to-head with Apple on their own platform? Now look at Real. On the Mac, they're competing head-to-head with Apple on a product that they give away. Where's the business sense in that?! It is a wonder that Real makes a player for Mac at all.

Even so, do you really think there is a solid link between MS Security Support and 911? Honestly, is there a real comparison there?

There just might be.

Schwartz invoked the precedent set by Sun's popular Java programming language. [...] We need to now take the model with Java and bring it to Solaris.

A problem that Schwartz wants to avoid is having Solaris splintered into different distributions like Linux, which he said creates application incompatibilities. Going the way of Linux-type licensing, he suggested, creates open source but not open standards.

This one talks to the infectee through Windows speech interface. Nice!