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Then you're probably out of business anyway, so what does it matter at that point?

(1) Disasters happen more often than people expect. And they can happen to you, not just the other guy. Wildpackets almost went out of business as a result of underestimating that.

(2) Being out of business anyway - well - that's a discussion I had with the owner of one small company. I pointed out to him that one of his core values was loyalty to his employees. In the event of a big disaster, he and his family would collect the insurance check and sell the site, but his (former) employees' mortgage payments would continue. He got the point and agreed to improve disaster recovery plans.

(3) "Both of our sites will never get hit at the same time". I had a friend in charge of DR for a large company who analyzed 10 years of data center disasters and came to the same conclusion. He put the backup right down the street from the primary. Ever hear of the Great Chicago Flood? Luckily for my friend he was working at another company when both his primary and backup were taken out by that event!

That's my 0.02 anyway.

sPh

Microsoft Buys Liquid Audio DRM Patents October 1, 2002.

However, in February, Microsoft signed a pact with Chinese officials to reveal the Windows operating system source code. Bill Gates even hinted that China will be privy to all, not just part, of the source code its government wished to inspect.

Given the evidence suppporting Jim Allchin's testimony, the Microsoft corporation is behaving traitorously, by exposing national security issues to untrusted foreign governments.

To give some context, this is a short column I wrote for this week's (4/21/2003) eWEEK news package on Windows Server 2003. It's short because of print space limitations. The whole collection of related news articles in this week's issue is at http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,3960,1034194,00.a sp.

Next week, eWEEK is publishing an eWEEK Labs review of the product. In that package, there are six pages of copy covering Windows Server 2003 overall security changes, IIS 6.0, 64-bit Windows, Active Directory changes, file and print changes, development, and storage and SAN changes.

Thanks,
Tim Dyck
eWEEK Labs West Coast Technical Director

IANAL, but it seems to me that the Doctrine of Fair Use (or whatever it is) applies in this case.

I just thought of a counterexample to the Ford/GM oil filter argument. Ford could certainly put a chip in its cars that would insist that new oil filters "prove" that they're "authorized". Any third-party filter maker that tried to spoof this chip would be in violation of the DMCA.

Too weird for real life? Guess again!!!

There's already Super DMCA legislation that, in certain US states, prohibits the masking and concealment of any internet communication.

Check the eWeek story here.

"Although TCG is being billed as the TCPA's successor, most of the TCPA's members had no idea of its imminent demise. The TCG sent out a mass e-mail message to all of the former group's members this morning at roughly the same time the press release announcing the TCG's formation went out."

-- eWEEK: Trusted Computing Group Forms

I submitted an article yesterday that commented on the ruling, but it was rejected. Basically, Sun got their asses handed to them by at least one of the judges. Here's the article.

Netscape 2.0 3.3MB
Netscape 3.0 5.9 MB
Netscape 4.0 8.0 MB
Netscape 4.78 23.5 MB

MSIE 2.0 1.2 MB
MSIE 3.0 5.1 MB
MSIE 4.0 16.7MB
MSIE 5.0 11.9 MB

As to why it is common, if you recall the anti-trust trial in the U.S. where Microsoft was found guilty and the appeal where the verdict of guilty was upheld, you'll find that among the records is the fact the MSIE gained market because it was bundled with MS-Windows.

If left to compete on technical merits, MSIE will fall out of the market place and disappear. MSIE has fallen so far behind in technology, usability and security that it's a marketing wonder that any corporate intranets allow it at all. Perhaps offering a Google-like competitor is the only way to keep from losing all ground to Mozilla, Opera and others.

Microsoft could easily shut out any normal search service by further leveraging their desktop monopoly. Simply add searching functions in MSIE that make it hard to use anything than their own service, much the same way that HTTP error messages have been co-opted in MSIE.

Makers of embedded devices and other systems are quite aware of this and have been turning to Mozilla and Opera.

Microsoft will alse use the new, incompatible MS-Office 2003 file format as leverage for forcing DRM. The first step will be to reach critical mass with DRM encumbered software through new purchases or license 6. Part of this first step will be to force MS-server 2003 into each work site. Once the software is in place, then second step is the hardware. Once both are in place, your data is hostage.

The only apparent way to eliminate this problem in the near term is to steadfastly refuse any hardware with any DRM whatsoever. Failure to avoid DRM hardware will be walking into an economic tarpit.

Yes, the next major release of Red Hat Linux will be Red Hat 9, but:

Something that nobody so far has picked up on, is that this is just the start of an entirely new versioning scheme. Red Hat's operating systems manager, Matt Wilson, has suggested that the release following 9 may not be 9.1 or 10, but rather something entirely different. This makes sense in the light of Red Hat's recent announcement of its Enterprise range. I guess Red Hat Linux may no longer exist in its current form, but rather branch into Red Hat Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Linux Personal, with a new version numbering scheme to boot, maybe starting again at 1, or maybe even based on the year it was released in.

Well, it was reported by a fairly reputable organization. No one linked to this for some reason.

I was probably not the only one to wonder what this mad hatter thing is. Seems to be their own desktop-oriented linux distro that comes bundled with the (PC) hardware. Still in vaporware, promised sometime later this year. I vaguely remember hearing that the pricing model would be a monthly subscription. More info here

MSIE is so unpolished that you can still get hit by simply visiting a web page. If you turn off scripting in MSIE, you can get rid of many vulnerabilities, but you also get rid of the only non-religious reason to run MSIE. In which case, you'd be far better off running Opera, Mozilla, or other top of the line browsers. MSIE lags far behind other browsers in function and ease of use. There'd be no point in Open Sourcing it unless Microsoft was planning to drop MSIE and hand maintenance over to devotees.

People are catching on to the fact that Microsoft is a marketing engine and not a software company. OS X has the software and is easiest for users, but even the linux distros are just as easy as Windows and are pretty much there with everything except games. Linux distros and OS X have all Windows versions beat, hands-down, on ease of maintenance.

I think they linked to the wrong one. Here is today's eWeek story that says the explicit reason they are pushing back WWDC is to announce Panther.

A good and related article There are concerns deserving attention here.

The release date of April 22 was released a long time ago

(ie: January 21, 2003, just incase you didn't get the picture)

Centrino Is a Showstopper

Centrino Special Report

Even as recently as last month, MSIE came in 6 out of 6 in a comparison of web browsers. Opera and Mozilla, among others, have it beat by a long shot in all categories (well, Opera costs, but I get my boss to pay). It's even documented in U.S. Federal Court records that MSIE acheived market share over Netscape by bundling MSIE with new copies of MS-Windows.

Quattro, Lotus 1-2-3 and other spread sheets were faster and more mature. It wasn't until MS-Excel v4 when Microsoft's alternativs started to come up to near the same grade as competitors.

Likewise with small desktop databases. Foxpro, dBase, FileMaker, Reflex, and others were still a length ahead of MS-Access. After all Microsoft is still playing catchup, though they did manage to buy out Foxpro. Oracle9i and IBM's DB2 by far offer the best performance and functionality for high end SQL servers. Postgresql and MySQL have the mid-range covered and would be what Microsoft's SQL server is trying hardest to compete with. The Microsoft SQL server is not up to snuff nor is it secure.

But almost-as-good won't displaced established tools. That's where leveraging and sales pitches comes in.

Early versions MS-Word were a unique exception among Microsoft's products in that they were actually competitive with contemporary products. However, whether MS-Word variants were actually better than WordPerfect, AMI and others is probably more an issue of taste than something objective. It and MS-Windows were used to shoehorn MS-Excel into sites.

just a couple more tidbits - yesterday corel announced that the next version of WordPerfect Office 11 will ship in April, at least two months ahead of Microsoft Office 2003, and there was also an eWeek story about Microsoft Office embracing XML.

Storm Clouds Rise Over H-1B



"Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, introduced a bill this week to lift all limits on foreign workers "

She deleted this press release, but it's in the Google cache ...

She was among 26 House members (14 Democrats and 12 Republicans) who achieved perfect scores for their votes in the 105th Congress on encryption, securities litigation, patent reform, fast track, MFN, export controls, H1-B visas, and Y2K issues.

and she takes money from Microsoft!
(click on expand all).

Dump this wench!

At that time he also confirmed to eWeek that the company had hired high-profile attorney David Boies and his legal firm to investigate whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD infringed on the Unix intellectual property it owned.

"SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system," said Darl McBride, president and CEO of SCO, before accidentally knocking over the podium with his enormous ego.

There's another good story on this on eWeek which has an interview with the CEO of SCO.

my immediate question is, Ford runs linux? on what?

and second question is, isn't SCO like... Caldera?

aaaanyway; I guess linux is taking away the marked share of UNIX boxes a lot more than it's headway into the desktop (windows) arena. fighting the wrong crowd, I'd say...

maybe microsoft will file a suit that says "we want damages because linux makes our business model un-profitable."

my immediate question is, Ford runs linux? on what?

and second question is, isn't SCO like... Caldera?

aaaanyway; I guess linux is taking away the marked share of UNIX boxes a lot more than it's headway into the desktop (windows) arena. fighting the wrong crowd, I'd say...

maybe microsoft will file a suit that says "we want damages because linux makes our business model un-profitable."

my immediate question is, Ford runs linux? on what?

and second question is, isn't SCO like... Caldera?

aaaanyway; I guess linux is taking away the marked share of UNIX boxes a lot more than it's headway into the desktop (windows) arena. fighting the wrong crowd, I'd say...

maybe microsoft will file a suit that says "we want damages because linux makes our business model un-profitable."

More to the point -- what are they supposed when someone sends them .doc files?

If the file format is open and well-documented then it shouldn't matter which application users choose to run - they can choose what works best for them in regards to performace, ease of use, security and such.

.DOC files, even if they are MS-Word, are the very example of interoperability problems. There is no MS-Word format, but instead a whole suite of related, yet incompatible formats (please point out my mistakes, this is from memory):

• DOS
  • 2,3,4&5.x
• Macintosh
  • 2,3,4,5,6, 98, XP
• Windows
  • 2.x, 6.x,7.x, 97, 2000, XP

Just sticking with the DOS/Windows examples above, that's 9 different formats in less than 15 years, an average of 0.6 per year. To put it in English, a new format is put out more frequently than every two years. Lack of forward compatibility between the file formats used by these applications has been used consistently to drive upgrades of office packages, operating systems and hardware, all of which cause strain with retraining and budgets.

Heads up on the changes planned in for MS-Office 2003, especially the DRM, they look to cause extreme difficulty.

Dave Wheeler worked on the original Salon code, which has since become Bricolage, a generally well regarded CMS (in fact lauded by eWeek as "Most Impressive" of 2002

It's so that customers can run NT4-specific apps under future products like Windows Server 2003. See this eWeek article.

Even Micro$oft is now admitting that open source has a bright future.

This BSA business has been going on for awhile now, and is apparently proving very profitable to the BSA's member's. Here's a article from eWeek article that explains the tactics in a bit more detail.

Possibly the most misleading and offensive part of this whole mess is the active solicitation by the BSA of "disgruntled" employees willing to rat out their employers. What is hardly mentioned is that, should the BSA claim to have evidence provided by such a source, they must first prove the validity of that source before any legal warrant can be issued. No law enforcement agency will raid a business, big or small, on the uncorroborated word of a suspect source (although, with Ashcroft, you never know). As a few of the posts above have noted, there have already been instances where companies have ratted out rivals in an apparent attempt to gain an business edge from the disruption (Sometimes, you have just gotta love capitalism). If this is in fact happening, I imagine the risks of retaliatory lawsuits by the victimized is sky high, and I'll be willing to bet the dollar amounts awarded to folks unjustly accused will far outweigh any gains the BSA would have made on a few unlicensed copies of Win98.

Then, there's the extra expense of litigation. Whether necessary or not, businesses forced to litigate against the BSA will have no choice but to raise prices to cover the costs of both the case itself an the inevitable increase in insurance rates. Members of the BSA will also be faced with increases in legal spending, and this in turn will only serve to raise prices for their products. How can this be good for anyone?

The thing that really burns me is that, by operating on the assumption that the mere threat of an audit is often enough to make smaller companies roll over on command, the BSA membership demonstrates a callous disregard for their customer base, and an apparent gleeful willingness to offend just about anyone as long as they get the cash. If this is their idea of an acceptable new business model, we are in deep trouble in the days/years to come - UCITA or not.

This BSA business has been going on for awhile now, and is apparently proving very profitable to the BSA's member's. Here's a article from eWeek article that explains the tactics in a bit more detail.

Possibly the most misleading and offensive part of this whole mess is the active solicitation by the BSA of "disgruntled" employees willing to rat out their employers. What is hardly mentioned is that, should the BSA claim to have evidence provided by such a source, they must first prove the validity of that source before any legal warrant can be issued. No law enforcement agency will raid a business, big or small, on the uncorroborated word of a suspect source (although, with Ashcroft, you never know). As a few of the posts above have noted, there have already been instances where companies have ratted out rivals in an apparent attempt to gain an business edge from the disruption (Sometimes, you have just gotta love capitalism). If this is in fact happening, I imagine the risks of retaliatory lawsuits by the victimized is sky high, and I'll be willing to bet the dollar amounts awarded to folks unjustly accused will far outweigh any gains the BSA would have made on a few unlicensed copies of Win98.

Then, there's the extra expense of litigation. Whether necessary or not, businesses forced to litigate against the BSA will have no choice but to raise prices to cover the costs of both the case itself an the inevitable increase in insurance rates. Members of the BSA will also be faced with increases in legal spending, and this in turn will only serve to raise prices for their products. How can this be good for anyone?

The thing that really burns me is that, by operating on the assumption that the mere threat of an audit is often enough to make smaller companies roll over on command, the BSA membership demonstrates a callous disregard for their customer base, and an apparent gleeful willingness to offend just about anyone as long as they get the cash. If this is their idea of an acceptable new business model, we are in deep trouble in the days/years to come - UCITA or not.

To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline

Here, then, we see the beginnings of a process of reparation and of the chastisement of wrong-doing which reminds us that though the mills of the gods grind slowly they grind exceedingly small.

You are making statements to the effect of bsd beating the pants off gnu/linux, and tre cowardly is your response to what I point out?

Adoption rates aren't important to bsd beating the pants off gnu/linux?

Can you name which country outside the US has announced that bsd or mac will be replacing windows? Or which local government body? Or which school?

I thought so.

Every announcement coming out of foreign goverments (peru, france, germany, australia, spain, china, is it necessary to go on?) concerning adoption of open source software has been...bsd?...mac?...or...?...what was it again?...gnu/linux.

What is the operating system/desktop system that is breaking into schools and local goverments on wide basis? bsd?...mac?...or...?...what was it again?...gnu/linux.

While bsd may have technically superior underpinnings (until recently or even currently), and imo has a better license, it cannot be disputed that gnu/linux has such a huge momentum, such huge talk, such huge buildup, that it is going to steamroll anything in its path, including bsd and microsoft.

Yes, microsoft will be around a long time. But its stock price and earnings are going to be decimated within the next two to three years, probably sooner. Their filing with the sec finally admits as much. The analysts will no longer be able to deny it, and neither will the schill survey companies paid off by microsoft be able to cover it up much longer with their fabricated tco studies.

Yes, bsd will be around for a long time as well. Thanks to the developers behind it. But they may not be around as long as they thing they will. Their attitude sucks. And is reflected in their supporters.

gnu/linux has a huge momentum behind it for one reason. The gpl. As much as it is hated, it is what has brought gnu/linux to the forefront today, and it is the david that will topple the goliath. There is absolutely no way around it. Even with the multi-hundred million dollar payoff bill attempted in India, Indian developers are still going with gnu/linux. Other developers worldwide are going with bsd?...mac?...gnu/linux. gnu/linux may not be as technically superior to bsd (or it may be already with the 2.5 kernel, or close to getting there) but it is where the action is when it comes to developers, when it comes to major company support, when it comes to foreign government support, when it comes to user support, when it comes to running on big iron for the future, when it comes to just about any measure.

With gnu/linux being ported to big iron, which companies will be using bsd to develop for big iron?

With gnu/linux being ported first for Itanium and Opteron, which companies are going to drag bsd to the table?

I saw an article in one of the tech school publications locally that interviewed a company recruiter. When they were discussed what technical courses of study were important to his company, and what his company was using (it was one of the fortune 100 companies in technology) he responded that it was linux (gnu/linux is more accurate). Why? According to him, it didn't matter anymore, that what the college graduates going into tech knew was linux. He didn't say mac. He didn't say bsd. He said linux. (I think it was Computer Shopper of about two or three weeks ago, picked up from local library lobby or bank lobby).

Don't you get it yet?

Adoption rate doesn't matter? It makes all the difference in the world. Let's see where mac/bsd is in a year, and where gnu/linux is. And in two years.

Remember these threads when the roof caves in on microsoft. And then when it caves in on apple. Unless apple goes first. bsd will be there. In the same spot its always been.

According to eweek the BofA infection was traced to some manager with an infected laptop. Still, that's too close for my comfort.

Yet they seem to be having an effect on a multi-billion dollar company. Funny that.

Attention Mr. Gates:

Following recent testimony, it has come to our attention that Microsoft(tm) products perform mission-critical operations in our national War Against Terror(tm).

Consequently, the source code for Microsoft Windows(tm), Microsoft Office(tm), Microsoft Bob(tm), and related software, is immediately upgraded to a top-secret classification.

Federal Marshals will be arriving shortly to quaranty your facility, until the NSA can complete background checks on each of your personnel to ensure they can be trusted with such a grave responsibility.

Non-citizens, or those failing background checks, will be interred as an enemy combatant until the cessation of the conflict.

Sincerely,
F. B. I.

As mentioned in other posts, if the file format had been open and documented there would not really be an issue. However, since legacy formats are starting to punish businesses with real costs, the issue can no longer be ignored, even by those that don't/can't plan ahead.

DMCA and EUCD are two additional reasons for migrating from legacy formats. These two could legally prevent businesses (and agencies) from accessing their own documents if encoded in undocumented, proprietary formats and the tools to manage these formats are no longer licensed.

If they can work towards an open file format system to replace MS office, they could chip away @ the MS desktop market.

I wonder what the results would've been if they'd managed to get their hands on the (much rumored) version of OS X that runs on Intel processors...

Be, Inc.'s lawsuit against Microsoft is still on.

(From OSnews.com)

There is actually a pretty good story on all the new announcements over at eWEEK also. I was pretty surprised about the browser announcement, mainly because everyone thought Internet Explorer had won the browser war, though it has never worked quite as well on the Mac as it has on the PC. Hopefully this Safari will fly. Has anyone gotten a look at Keynote (the new presentation software) yet?

..of Microsoft browser networking bugs which make it only work well with IIS. For example, This bug causes IE to fail to properly shutdown SSL connections. IE browsers using SSL conenctions with standard Apache webserver configurations will have all kinds of errors due to this issue. You need to either disable keepalives or increase the keepalive timeout to something outrageous like 2 minutes. This "bug" has been around for ages yet despite IE being in version 6, it is yet to be fixed. My guess is this is actually some kind of "feature" that makes IE work faster with IIS (since the connection never closes, subsequent reqests go faster, assuming the webserver knows how to speak the broken protocol).

If this were an issue Itanium would already be gone. Remember the original schedule?

I suspect that the real reason that the Intel X86-64 processor got canceled is that Intel decided that the Opteron was likely going into vapor phase. The fact that AMD has little to say on the subject sadly confirms this. The z800 was never officially dropped, it just faded away quietly - which is how vapor phase works.

I don't suppose it matters that AMD has demoed working silicon?

And yes, I have a manual from Zilog featuring the Z800 - so the documentation AMD has recently produced really doesn't matter much.

You are of course right in the sense that until the exact moment AMD actually begins shipping some volume of these chips at full speed, it is unknown if they will actually be able to do so. However, I think you're being very naive in your assessment.

The best evidence I can offer of this is the Cray supercomputer being built using over 10,000 Opterons. Trust me, Cray wouldn't risk it's fragile reputation and profits on "vaporware".

Gee, I wonder why Itanic didn't get the design win? ;-)

The ultimate aggressive move would be to release Marklar, the x86 version of Mac OS X.

Epomymous Mallard

Oh no, this never happens on OS X.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Liberty Alliance is "waving the white flag" at Passport, according to this article at eWeek.

We ran a story about that on eWEEK a couple months back ... From what Quark's been saying at Seybold San Francisco and other gatherings, XPress 6.0 will represent a whole new code base, not just an upgrade optimized for Mac OS X's Carbon APIs.

Google news found a few more stories (including the Slashdot "story"...) on this topic. Since MS paid for the study, but has not released it to the public, it might be worthwhile to read what little details are available.
Study Finds Windows Cheaper Than Linux
Windows costs less than Linux . A bit . Sometimes - MS study
Infoworld
and more