Slashdot Mirror

QNX Powers Universal Media Gateway for Next-Generation Digital Video Networks
QNX Software Systems today announced that the QNX® Neutrino® realtime operating system (RTOS) will be shipping as part of the Cisco uMG9850 QAM Module, a new quadrature amplitude modulation product designed to let cable operators use Gigabit Ethernet to deliver video-on-demand and other multimedia services efficiently and cost-effectively to TV set-top receivers.

'Little OS that could' just might
"In a deal signed two years ago, Cisco (csco) chose QNX as its preferred real-time OS vendor as part of Cisco's 'ongoing efforts to increase the reliability and availability of data-voice-video networks.' Since then, not much seems to have materialized from the partnership."

Cisco's HFR is here
"The IOS-XR operating system kernel was acquired from QNX Software Systems, a small Canadian developer of realtime operating system code to companies in the automotive, communications, defense, industrial automation and medical device markets. Cisco already ships QNX operating system code in its uMG9850 QAM digital video module for the Catalyst 4500 Gigabit Ethernet switch."

Cisco Unveils the HFR
" The transition is analagous to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) moving from DOS-based operating systems to Windows NT, says analyst Stephen Kamman of CIBC World Markets.

Just as NT did, IOS XR could begin trickling down to lower-level systems, eventually permeating Cisco's entire portfolio, including edge and enterprise boxes. "The question is how quickly they can push that software through the product line," Kamman says."

"The software is based on a kernel licensed from QNX Software Systems, but tailored for the job. 'We have made some pretty substantial modifications to [the QNX code] that are Cisco proprietary,' Volpi says."

[Disclaimer: This is a very happy QNX Employee.]

-T

Now you guys please be careful not to /. Cisco :)

As opposed to NetGear, who slashdot other people...

Nobody likes lawsuits (except, perhaps lawyers). But in all likelyhood, they will remain part of the response to unauthorized file-sharing.

Even the EFF acknowledges this. Not so long ago the EFF suggested that the RIAA should be suing infringers and in the EFF's more recent file-sharing solution "white paper" they continue to suggest the same. (under "What about file sharers who won't pay?" you'll see "Copyright holders (and perhaps the collecting society itself) would continue to be entitled to enforce their rights against 'free-loaders.'"

It is no coincidence that Cisco's own naming convention is HFR. I think that we all know what HFR means.

"We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards."

Opera obviously does support XHTML, and issued a press release in XHTML which points out Microsoft's lie.

This and other lies from Microsoft are exposed in an Opera press release.

company which poses no threat to Microsoft, and in fact builds it business on Microsoft products (Windows) claims they have targeted them.

Opera is cross platform and their business is far more then just Windows. IE and Opera compete on the embedded level also which MS does not currently have a monopoly on and can not just make them go away. This is more then Opera running on Windows not working on MSN by chance.

this is one of my gripes about some websites. i noticed shutterfly has a "Click Next if you wish to skip future warnings and use Shutterfly with this unsupported browser." great, i can make the choice to puruse a sub-"standard" website if i still want to. sometimes i think they forget that they are offering goods/services that i can find somewhere else.

"But a Microsoft product would theoretically integrate better with Windows desktop machines, and if the company can serve up an impressive offering, Linux could be in for a tussle."

Windows to trademark NT
When I was working at Nortel (hadn't merged with Bay Networks at this point), this causes a little stir since Nortel trades under the symbol 'NT'. Now I know company initials are different from trademarks (except for maybe for IBM), but Nortel felt they "owned" NT as a trademark IIRC. There was also the watercooler MS bashing of shareholders in Nortel would lose money everytime "NT" crashed. Well since then to-date, both 'NTs' have crashed many times

http://news.com.com/Linux+contributors+face+new+ru les/2100-7344_3-5218724.html?tag=nefd.top

Yes, there would be a lot of ethical questions about paying our Nintendo Superstars more than our teachers or our police or what have you. But people don't seem to mind that much with professional athletes. Why think of pro gamers any differently?

To put this in perspective, Albert Bell signed a 5-year, 65 million dollar contract. The median income in MLB is 800,000 dollars per season. Tiger Woods made an estimated 78 million for 2002-2003, including endorsements. This #1 highest ranked korean professional videogame player is making less than 200k per year.

If conjecture and heresay are true, it is the rare US "professional" player that earns as much as a teacher. South Korea has always been a little ahead of the curve when it comes to integrating videogames and society, but even then 100,000 dollars is lower than the top bracket in most professions. True, it is the rare public school teacher that makes 180k, but school superintendents do on occasion make that much. And what about corporate training programs, or inspirational speakers?

To me, 200,000k sounds "fair."

To steal from a news.com.com.com.com.com site The proposed patents apparently seek to protect methods other applications could use to interpret the XML dialect, or schema, Office uses to describe and organize information in documents. Microsoft recently agreed to publish those schemas and is looking at opening other chunks of Office code.

XML, basically, allows you to define your own "language" within it. That language is what they are endeavoring to patent. Which is just annoying. And off topic.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5210518.html

"The FBI only gets involved when they have solid evidence that there is a loss of over $50,000"

Yet they didn't raid those responsible for SQL server, which caused a $900 million loss?

disclaimer: I work for napster

yes, we have no control over draconian DRM
yes, it pisses us off as well because we also are users of the service

as much as i don't like more DRM, Janus looks to allow DRM downloads to be playable on portable devices

Napster is in it for the money.
There is no one in the business that isn't.
That said, if we could remove DRM or change pricing significantly we would.

Napster beats iTunes to Europe with U.K. launch

I thought this article looked familiar. It's actually from C|Net's news.com.com.

Although this was a long time ago it would be nice to see them bring back the option.

I know they're not a small company, but I know they support multiple OS's to meet customer needs. This Interview with Martin Fink talks about it. It's kind of old, but it's a good read.

From the Interview:

How would you characterize Linux sales, in terms of hardware?
The vast majority is on Intel x86 servers. We're also seeing sales on Itanium, especially for large supercomputing applications. There's an airport whose approach control system is HP Linux on Itanium. Right now, Linux is definitely the leader on Itanium. HP is not all about Linux. We're about multiple operating systems. Our analysis shows that 85 percent of enterprises have multiple operating systems. The idea of saying, "The world is about Linux" is not the real world. The real world is, "You've got to have a strong Linux solution, but you've also got to have Windows and Unix." Our Systems Insight Manager (formerly Nimbus) is a platform that looks across the whole thing.

HP has a close relationship with Microsoft. How does pushing Linux affect that relationship?
Our strategy is a multi-operating system strategy. IBM is pushing Linux at the expense of other things. We're pushing Linux as part of a complete enterprise solution. Does Microsoft want HP to be selling Linux stuff? No. But at the same time, they understand that Linux is in the market, and we have to compete. It's not about competing with Microsoft. HP is not poking a finger in their eye. It's about competing with Dell and IBM.

" Microsoft indeed has provided funding to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution for five years, a Microsoft representative said, without disclosing how much has been granted. Microsoft funds several public policy institutes, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, the representative said. "

CNet

It's pretty clear that Ken Brown is an idiot. Here is a quote:

"It's clear to me, at least from quotes from Tanenbaum, that Linus started from Minix...He just sat down with Minix and wrote this product. By definition, that is not an invention," Brown said. "If you sit down with the Ford blueprints and build a Chrysler and don't give Ford any credit, that's not invention."

In an interview conducted for the study, Tanenbaum said Minix "was the base that Linus used to create Linux. He also took many ideas from Minix, including the file system, source tree and much more."

He is clueless and has no brain which could absorb a clue. It would require intelligence to actually claim that Linux copied other work, and he doesn't seem to have the capacity to understand the difference between "inspired by" and "copied". I suppose that is why AdTI hired him, and why SCO or Microsoft ired AdTI.

We're talking about electronic voting, something which demands security (and transparency, but never mind the apparent paradox just now) and they're not concerned that someone has broken into their network?

Especially given the recent news about the heap overflow in CVS that is being discussed in the immediately previous slashdot article.

1. "We will reshuffle development organizations to be more efficient and to make only games that will sell well," Sega President Hisao Oguchi said.

This quote from news.com makes me worried about exactly what kind of games they're really talking about. I do hope we don't see Sammy churn out video games that are as generic as pachinko machines. Same thing over and over with a different graphical template. I shudder to imagine.

2. Part of Sega's allure for Satomi--who owns 27.6 percent of Sammy's shares outstanding--is using Sega's titles in Sammy's "Atomiswave" game machines for arcade use. Sega's arcades will also likely use the Atomiswave machines.

What does THIS mean for Sega's plans for a new arcade based off PowerVR's brand new Series 5 hardware? While probably similar to Atomiswave it's certainly not the same thing.

Whether Sega produces more games for the console or not really doesn't concern me as much as whether I'd ever want any of these generic quarter munchers to begin with.

DocYouMeant Hound is a search tool that I've been using.

I have a friend who knows the guy who made it. I'll bet he'll be annoyed when he finds out google is getting into the local search game. :-)

This is one of the things that makes Google great: they allow (expect?) their employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects that are unrelated to their main job. Basically, this 20% just needs to be focused on stuff that can benefit Google.

See this article

X1 seems to be the most popular one out there.

DiskMeta, they had this project in beta for a while, the Windows product went into relese just last week, the site says

DT Search, I remember their ads in bunch of computer magazines, although have never used them myself.

EFS, found it on download.com, supports MS Office and PDF as well as other formats.

Click here for CNET version.

And if we put in the equation paying customers, then Yahoo could give more storage, their announce was for 100Mb free, and virtually unlimited for paying users

GFS: How about a GMail Files System? I am not a programmer and don't geek down to that level, but it sounds plausible. Break your file system into say 256KB (encrypted) binary attachments with distinct subject lines for locating the the right message when you need it. You now have a huge store of email acting as the allocation units for a file system.

GFS RAID: Google is not the only one offering huge email stores. Get more than one of the huge accounts from Google or SpyMac and you have the equivelent of multiple HDDs. If you call each of those allocation emails a "stripe" and spread them across two or three different stores, you have a GMail RAID-1 or RAID-5 set.

This sounds like it would be easy to simulate and run on a local mail server, then simply point to your GMail/SpyMac/Whatever accounts bring online. High latency and low bandwidth, yes, but very distributed. Maybe good for remote backups.

c > 11,000,000 miles per second. Passenger planes travel 700 mph tops. That's less than 0.007%.

Please refrain from coming up with bullshit theories until doing at least a cursory search for information. An "I'm feeling lucky" search on "airlines cell phone ban" brought up this article.

Here.

I'd hope that the EU Parliment votes the way it should and not approve the new resolution. From what that article says, it seems that opponents of the new draft have an arduous task ahead of them.

The key point that you're missing is that MSM.com's behaviour is designed to make the user think that Opera has serious bugs. There is certianly no justification for that.

Your analogy only works if MSN were to completely and visibly block Opera; which they actually tried with every non-IE browser a few years ago. That didn't work out for them.

It could have been an honest mistake. They say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, of course. But some of us remember a few years ago when MSN blocked all non-IE browsers from accessing their site, and even went so far as to redirect people to a page telling them to download their goat-kissing IE browser so it would render properly.

In this case, I'm calling malice. :P

I did a quick search and came up with this..

"Securities law requires private companies that exceed a certain level of stock distribution to file quarterly financial data with federal regulators. ...A private company must report its finances once it has more than 500 common shareholders--or stock-option holders--and $10 million in assets, according to section XII(g) of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934."

from news.com - Cisco apparently thinks this is not a problem at all

Don't they realize that before long users will figure out where it is coming from and then stop downloading and installing their software all together?

Take a look at the download.com list of popular software. KaZaA to date has 348,403,514 downloads. Average user doesn't know the crap that is bundled underneath.

Not much chance that this will be seen now, but according to CNet Cisco has confirmed that "unspecified amount" of code been leaked. The article is here

See: http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-5213724.html?tag=n efd.top

ignore the bit about the cost, its free...

umm... you've got that wrong. Uploading is illegal. Downloading is not illegal.

Yes, see for instance the KaZaa ruling. Under Dutch law, you're not prohibited from providing a framework for file sharing. The provider is not responsible for illegal actions taken by the users.

well, that's a chicken and egg kind of problem, but the point is that the FCC licensed away all that spectrum *for free* and hasn't bothered to coerce the industry to fulfill their end of the bargain...

in theory, that's the citizen's spectrum that they're using.

Before I will install apps like this, I always take a look at google and see what I come up with looking for the appName + adware. I loathe (as 98% of the rest of ya'll?) adware/spyware/malware..so I really would need a very good reason to install programs with adware.

below is what I found:

Piolet:
http://download.com.com/3302-2166_4-10192787.html? pn=1&fb=2

and
http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/p2p/

Editor's note: This download includes additional applications bundled with the software's installer file. Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings. Pay close attention to the end user license agreement and installation options.

Here in Canada, because of that point, there are already alot of legal grey areas and trade offs because of this.

Yep, we have some wonderul trade-offs such as downloading music for personal use is legal in Canada, and has been for some time. Uploading, we're still working on, but we have already have a consumer-favorable ruling (mostly due to the half-assed case presented by the CRIA)..

BTW: Media levy only applies to Audio CD-Rs.. so just buy normal, Data CD-Rs, and burn Audio on them! In case you're wondering who in their right mind would actually buy an Audio CD-R, most stand-alone professional Audio CD duplication/recording equipment requires it.

note that download.com still has version 2.661... this might be the version people should start mirroring.

And only 55 people were needed to build it!

According to this article

Under current copyright law, Americans who record a TV program or radio segment generally may "sell or otherwise dispose of" that analog recording or digital file as they wish. [My understanding is that this is true only if it does not impact the copyright holders ability to make money on the protected work and that the sell price only reflects the cost of producing the copy with out any profit made on the work itself.]

The proposed bill would end that exemption, handing copyright owners substantial new control over the distribution of their works by curtailing copying rights granted to consumers under a doctrine known as "fair use." "If you were to take today's episode of 'E.R.' and tape it and give it to your mother, it would be copyright infringement under this bill," said Jessica Litman, a professor at Wayne State University who specializes in copyright law.