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The word "never" should never be used in a technology news article. Well, maybe if they're referring to OS/2... ;)

It's hard to believe the author of this article has been a technology news writer for at least a decade. "Linux will never be..." "Linux will never gain..." She doesn't mean never. I think she means in the short term (5 yrs maybe), which seems like an eternity in the tech industry. But to say something, especially something new, will never take over a market or will never be used for critical systems is simply rediculous. By this author's writing, some execs, if they're smart enough to read that far into the articles, will think Linux has mostly run its course and found its place in the industry since it'll "never" get beyond certain levels. By her logic, if she wrote an article about Microsoft back in 1985, she'd have said "Windows will never be a serious player in the server market."

This author's writing is incredibly irresponsible.

Dude, these things look pretty sweet, and I'll be sure to get one....if the price is right.

"It's not available yet, and Oqo doesn't expect to manufacture its devices on its own, so it has said nothing about a ballpark price for the units."

Does anybody have any realistic estimate for what these will cost?

(That quote is from the Forbes.com article here, btw)

He's Colin Powell's son, as evidenced in this Forbes report.

Wow. Kinky. Or did you mean fallacy? Anyway, it's not a fallacy.

According to Forbes loss on the Gamecube is $180.
According to MoreDeals initial losses on the PS2 was $188.

Hell, for each N64 sold, Nintendo spent more than $50 just on advertising the unit.

Heh, that Seinfield skit reminds me of AOL's little $54 billion write off.

Best I can tell that's how it works; AOL stock went up after they announced it (the biggest writeoff in history).

The serious businessman will know what I am talking about.

What like Steve Forbes?

Another good article about his latest work: On Forbes

Software companies are farming out development projects to developer shops in places like India. Not to pick on India in particular, but what's the probability that Al Queda members are located in India (or whatever country the dev work got sent to)? What is the further probability that "Mr. Al Queda" got himself hired by said dev shop?

I've heard in the media of dev projects being sent overseas. The reason I use India as an example is that a previous employer (oil field support co.) sent most of their development there.

A reference to IT work in India

This looks like pretty cool stuff, but it still isn't nearly as strong (or as light weight) as Goat-produced spider silk.

According to Forbes, this is how much it will cost to clone a person.

According to Forbes, this is how much it will cost to clone a person.

Does IBM have more plans to invest the financial sector now that banks are moving to Linux for economic reasons in the september 11th aftermath ? http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-887961.html http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/03/27/0327linux.ht ml

Besides, straight from Zdnet: "However, the software giant's profits are expected to fall about 9 percent from a year earlier even though revenues have risen, due to sales of more lower-margin products and heavy marketing expenses on new products like the Xbox video game console, analysts said."

-- Dyslexics of the world untie!

I read an article in Forbes a while ago that did a good job of explaining Wolfram to lay-people [business-oriented people, obviously] and also gave some hints at his reputation for arrogance. Stephen also has a list of his recent press coverage.

Why does Slashdot always link to NY Times, a subscription site? I don't subscribe, so can't read it. A quick search on Google News is all it takes to throw up other links about this story:

Reuters

Reuters

Does Slashdot have a deal with NY Times?

We should be VERY afraid then!! When companies get that big and no-one knows what they do!!

go to Forbes' web site and look under "Lists" and be afraid!

Interestingly it was a Murdoch TV funded outfit in Israel that cracked the Canal+ and ITV digital stb.

When questioned a Murdoch spokeman said that is served them right to have such lousy protection!

I think the Dirty Digger will eat Billyboy for breakfast if he dips his toe in the shark pond.

David

Wrong! From this article, msft has about $5.3b in cash and cash equivalents (that can be quickly liquidated), and, "using a slightly more expansive methodology", about $36b. But, remeber that this includes items like various venture capital investments that a) cannot be liquidated easily, b) probably required to support its stock price and market cap(~$300b with P/E of 45, a relative high). In any case, while the article acknowledges that the $500m that msft spent on xbox marketing won't probably affect it much, the stock market does not necessarily applaud a product unless the investment is recouped somehow in a fairly short interval.

Take a look at the casks the waste is stored in. They can survive a direct hit from a 747 fully loaded with fuel.

The engineering problems with nuclear waste storage have been worked out. It's just a matter of dealing with the political problems associated with the word "nuclear".

This story was previosly reported here. It seems thet the COS has been messing around with Google for a while now. Read the letter here and some more here. And i tough old stuff was rejected by the /. editors, just beacuse it makes the NYT, does not make it slashdoteable.

In an apparent response to criticism of its handling of a threatening letter from a Church of Scientology lawyer, the popular search engine Google has begun to make so-called "takedown" letters public. DMCA-censored pages are now two clicks and a cut-and-paste away from the regular search results.

The full text of two new letters to Google, dated April 9 and 10, already appears on the free speech site chillingeffects.org. "I think it's great that they're calling attention to the way the takedown provision can be used to compromise their search results," said Wendy Seltzer, Fellow of Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and co-founder of chillngeffects.org.

Google is still choosing to take advantage of the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows web sites to escape liability for copyright infringement if they take pages down in response to properly formed letters.

In a controversial move last month, Google pulled all pages from the anti-Scientology site xenu.net then restored the site's home page amid Internet outcry, just as Linux Journal readers were on their way to visit Google in person to ask for help finding censored pages about the alien warlord Xenu who is a key figure in Scientology's creation legend.

Only the name and telephone number of the attorney who wrote the letters have been removed from the copies on chillingeffects.org. Both of the new letters originate from the Los Angeles law firm of Moxon & Kobrin, where attorney Helena Kobrin has long been Scientology's standard-bearer against church critics on the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology and other online fora. Kobrin was not immediately available for comment

The letters are also linked to directly from Google search results. When results would have included a DMCA-censored page, the results page now includes a link to the takedown letter that resulted in the page being removed. A search this morning for site:xenu.net scientology produced the message:

"In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results."

Failing to act in response to a DMCA takedown letter is not against the law. "They can always choose not to take advantage of the safe harbor," Seltzer said. However, only by complying with the letter and taking pages out of their index can Google escape a possible copyright infringement lawsuit.

Finally, Google has expanded its DMCA page to include instructions for Counter Notification under the DMCA. A webmaster who believes that a non-infringing page is being unfairly censored can write the proper legal incantations and have the page put back into the index.

Google is then required to forward this Counter Notification to the original notifier, and then put the page back in the index "not less than 10 or more than 14" days after Google receives the Counter Notification. If your site is pulled out of Google and you're confused, chillingeffects.org has a web form that will generate a correctly formed Counter Notification.

How a Turkish family business partnered with Motorola and Nokia--and left the telecoms holding a $2.7 billion bag.

Seeking an entry point into the Turkish market at the height of the telecom frenzy of 1999, it was inevitable that Motorola and Nokia would run into the Uzans. In the past two decades Uzan, 67, and sons Uzan, 42, and Uzan, 34, have built a small family construction business into a giant private holding company with interests in everything from energy to pay TV. They've built their $1.3 billion fortune by fighting government monopolies and social ostracism. Capitalists to the core, they seemed to personify a new Turkey.

And, apparently, some of the notorious old. The clan has been slapped with a lawsuit in federal court, Southern District of New York, alleging that they fleeced the two telecom giants "through an elaborate scheme of deceit and intimidation" out of $2.7 billion in cash and equipment. The lawsuit was motivated by fears that the Uzans never intended to repay loans and were plotting to dilute the collateral behind the debt: shares in Telsim, a Turkish mobile phone operator, which the Uzans control.

If Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people) and Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people) had studied the rise of the Uzan empire, a labyrinth of at least 137 entities in nine countries, they might have trod warily to begin with. Instead, they ended up on the short end of what could be the largest loss ever in a telecom-vendor financing deal. The scandal even threatened to become an international incident. In January President Bush raised the issue with the visiting Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

The Uzans, who joined the ranks of FORBES Billionaires in 2001, have a contentious history. In Turkish courts they are involved in more than 100 criminal and civil cases, with allegations ranging from money laundering to libel. The attorney general of Turkey's Adana region calls the Uzans' ownership of power plants (which produce 4% of the country's electricity) a threat to national security, and wants to put the family in jail.

As power brokers go, this family has unusually hardscrabble beginnings. The Uzans are descended from farmers who immigrated to Turkey from Sarajevo around 1910. Kemal Uzan, a civil engineer, was the first to make a mark in business, founding a construction company in 1956. He landed lucrative contracts for soccer stadiums in the 1960s and dams in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks in part to a cozy relationship with the Turkish prime minister (and later president) Ozal. In 1984 Kemal Uzan bought Imar Bank for $21 million. A year later he founded Adabank.

The banks provided Cem Uzan with an entrée into the family enterprises, at age 24, after graduating with a degree in business from Pepperdine University. By the time he was 30 he proved his prowess by slyly overcoming Turkish laws preventing private transmission of TV signals: Working with Turgot Ozal's son, he rented studios in Germany and beamed the signal via satellite. Cem called it Star TV, and a year later introduced radio stations; he started a newspaper under the same brand in 1999. Presto--a media empire.

Don't cross a family that buys ink by the barrel. In 1999 the Uzans' Star printed a story accusing Turkish dairy product producer Sutas of selling cheese contaminated with excrement and mold. Sutas denied the charge and claimed the story was published only after Sutas rejected the Uzans' plea to stop advertising in competing publications. More recently the government took one of the Uzans' radio stations off the the air for seven days in August after it broadcast a private conversation between two executives of a rival media company chatting on Telsim mobile phones about backing out of an important deal.

The family made enemies here long before the Motorola contretemps. In 1989, three years after the opening of Istanbul's bourse, Franklin Templeton's Emerging Markets Fund invested in Cukurova Elektrik, a hydroelectric and gas utility firm. Shares rose from 50 cents to $3.50 a year later. In 1992 the Uzans paid $81 million for 11% of Cukurova and later tried to gain a majority stake. After they won 51% in 1993, they cleaned house, replacing the board of directors with their own nominees and placing Cukurova's cash balances in non-interest-bearing accounts at the Uzans' ImarBank. Within a year Cukurova's stock hit a new low of 18 cents and posted an $18 million loss after netting $41 million a year earlier. Templeton booked a $15 million loss.

"It was one of our worst investment experiences in emerging markets," recounts Templeton manager Mark Mobius. Turkey's Capital Markets Board alleges the Uzans' moves amounted to fraud, but suits filed by the board in 1995 stemming from this episode remain tied up in Turkish courts. The Uzans deny any wrongdoing. Says Cem: "Mobius is just mad that we got 51% without him. In business there is no room for emotion."

The Templeton conflict erupted the same year as a privatization drive in telecommunications. The government gave the Uzans permission to provide cellular phone service via Telsim. But they needed lots of cash and equipment. As early as 1994 Telsim borrowed $52 million in services from Motorola. By 1998 Cem, who ran the business with his younger brother Hakan, needed upwards of $500 million to acquire Turkey's second cellular license. Motorola advanced $200 million. Subsequent financing of Motorola's cellular infrastructure and equipment to Telsim ballooned the tab to $1.8 billion by September 2000--and $2.3 billion by March 2001. Motorola hoped to reap a windfall in handset sales, as the number of cell phone users in Turkey jumped from 1.7 million in April 1998 to 14 million in August 2000. Nokia chipped in $800 million-plus in the form of network switching equipment and services and cash. As collateral for the loans the Uzans pledged 66% of Telsim's shares to Motorola and 7.5% to Nokia.

It didn't take long for the loans to go bad. Turkey's double-barreled economic crisis--high interest rates and a 50% devaluation of the lira--caused Telsim to miss a $728 million installment to Motorola due in April 2001. The cellular company told Nokia it couldn't make any payments on $240 million owed because of the plunge in the lira.

Motorola and Nokia refused to renegotiate payment terms but found themselves in a bind. The shares of Telsim pledged to Motorola and Nokia did not include any voting rights. Seizing the security would have been problematic because foreigners are not permitted to run a telecom company in Turkey, and the Uzans showed no willingness to sell control to another Turkish owner.

A further knot. The vendor-financing contracts called for the settling of disputes before Swiss arbitrators. Motorola and Nokia bypassed that agreement by declaring the loan in default. Telsim interpreted that move as an anticipatory breach of contract, thus voiding a ban on any issuance of additional shares. In April 2001 Telsim raised $17 million in an offering that tripled the share base, diluting Motorola's stake to 22% and Nokia's to 2.5%.

The equipment providers were incensed but loathe to tell the world about the disaster. Filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission (Nokia trades as an ADR on the NYSE) did not disclose the problem of lending 100% of the purchase price of equipment to a company as tiny as Telsim, or the lack of any personal guarantees from the Uzans. In April 2001 Motorola reported in its 10-Q that Telsim was late on a $728 million cash payment which, it claimed, was a breach of contract.

Strange, then, that in their suit against the Uzans neither Nokia nor Motorola mentions breach of contract. Instead, they are charging 13 counts, including fraud and RICO, typically more difficult to prove. Why take this tack? A Motorola spokesman offers this: "We're the bigger fools, and we got scammed." The telecoms are evidently hoping to condemn the Uzans in court by dredging up their controversial past.

The Uzans reportedly offered to pay 10 cents on the dollar to settle the debt. No dice. Cem Uzan unapologetically says the suit "is just a smear campaign."

In any event, the family is hardly going into hiding. One of Cem's kids still goes to private school in New York City, where he maintains a $6 million Park Avenue apartment (one of at least five multimillion-dollar Uzan properties in Manhattan). He seems immune to his legal problems. "It's difficult to be understood when you are surrounded by jealousy," he says. Father and sons still shuttle from Turkey to Europe in a private jet or a Sikorsky helicopter. A year ago Cem dined at Buckingham Palace at a charity event for Prince Charles. Uzan père calls the shots from Geneva; Hakan leads a quieter life in Istanbul.

They can't completely ignore their troubles. The Uzans may elude the grasp of Motorola and Nokia. But to continue to enjoy their four yachts and their private island off the coast of Turkey, they must turn Telsim around or sell it for a tidy sum. Deutsche Telekom once offered them at least $5 billion for it. Now they'd be lucky to get $1 billion.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0318/086_print.h tml

Look on the bright side -- at least this 4/1 article didn't take a bite out of your country's dollar.

But there are risks in putting so much behind Linux. For starters, there are legal implications. Does anybody own the intellectual property of the "open-source" software? How exposed are companies to patent violation?

Obviously Lisa DiCarlo really understands the comcepts in the story she just wrote. Yeah.

Or perhaps, Forbes is more believable to you.

Assuming you are not said mental health practitioner, I will defer to someone else's authority on what constitutes "psycotic [sic] behavior."

I'm sorry, but how much respect are you supposed to show a system which suppressed a Forbes article giving demographic information on MagicFX conflicting with Jerome's status, and has twice successfully pressured the ISP of freesk8.org to take the site offline? This case is a verdict in search of a trial.

There is still an article at Forbes which identified MagicFX as a 22-year-old in 1999. Jerome might just be turning 22 now. I don't know.

It reminds me of the second season Star Trek: DS9 episode "Tribunal" where O'Brien is tried in a Cardassian court where it is known in advance he will be convicted. The judge is irritated that O'Brien refuses to just "plead guilty and get it over with" since the system needs (and intends to get by any means) its martyr.

I expect once it becomes clear that Jerome is going all the way with this case, the FBI will look for the quickest way out and drop the charges, rather than risk the embarrassment of a case they cannot prove. I'd be willing to do the legwork necessary to cause that embarrassment.

Part of mobile ICT is just common sense. These phones all come with an on/off button and most if not all service providers give you voice mail and caller ID as part of the basic package. If you go to a movie, cafe or meeting, turn of the *&@#$% phone. If you are expecting a particular phone call, tell those present at the start.

Some of the temptation is caused by countries which lack public transportation -- on the train, if I am not in a phone-free wagon, I can yack, dictate or program all I want without being a traffic hazard.

If I lived in the States or one of the other countries where cell phone misuse is a problem, I'd carry one of those highly illegal phone zappers everywhere I went.

Enron fell despite the fact that the govt tried their damned best to keep it propped up

No they didn't.

You can say the opposite until you're blue in the face but that doesn't make it true. The Bush government could have done a great deal more to help Enron but chose not to. That doesn't mean they didn't help them at all, clearly they did but the government clearly refused to bail out Enron. The government has bailed out companies in as much or worse trouble than Enron was in, such as LTCM previously mentioned. They chose not to do that for Enron.

I very much doubt Kenneth lay would agree with your assesment that he had "an extremely helpful government".

Your link to anantech's "Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001" is JUST i845 boards. They were not compared to the P4X266 at all.

You must have meant to show this article, where it is clearly shown that the VIA P4X266 has twice the memory bandwidth of the crippled i845. Or this page, that clearly shows the P4X266 outperforming the crippled i845 by 12%, on par with the Intel's RDRAM solution.

This article shows Intel stands to gain considerably from every rimm sold.

You said it yourself, Intel had an existing chipset in june of last year supporting DDR but would not allow motherboard manufacturers to use DDR with it. That means they crippled it themselves to make RDRAM look better.

Their deal did not end, it's just that Rambus's stock price dropped to less than $6 a share making Intel's options to buy Rambus at $10 a share look a little weak :)

Since Rambus's stock at one time traded at over $100 they could have seen a ten fold increase in their investment. But since rambus stayed so expencive, and offered no performance advantage over the Athlon, their GREED caused their own loss of market share.

You may also note I am keeping tabs on IDF and also mentioned Intel's DDR chipset but I am begining to think you don't read. Take note: "The fact is, a dual channel DDR chipset from Intel may be available for the Pentuim 4, but only for the Xeon, a processor not available except from Intel's favored OEM Parteners, such as Dell.

"Your entire post is full of inaccurate information and typical anti-Intel garbage. Don't take me as pro-Intel, but anyone can see right through your crap if they looked at it."

Why do you waffle here? We can certainly see through your crap, why be such a fence sitter about it? I take you as pro-intel with no spine. If you could stand up for them with a spine I would at least respect you, but as it is you post a few incorrect links and restate my point for me then roll around about what you like.

Dammit I told you to post Intelligently.

This is a great example of the Free Market at work!

It is also a great example of the "Tragedy of the Commons" where a free-for-all resource is exploited to the point of being useless. There are two possible answers to avoid this: One is regulation (which would be cumbersome and probably ineffective, given the global nature of the Internet), or technical means (which I favor). In any case, there must be a certain penalty associated to misusing the resource, or else we'll have a econonomy-textbook case here.

Two links which might be worth a read: This and this (go up one directory for more comments).

But really, "why are we interested?"?

FYI Ireland overtook the US to become the worlds biggest software exporter in 1999, and was top in 2001... so do enjoy your laugh at the expense of this poor technologically-backward country... :-)

Remember, God created whiskey to stop us ruling the world.

It's Lent, and we're off the drink...

Al.

Looks like June 6 of last year.
http://www.forbes.com/2001/06/06/0606topblock.html
Late fees--or what Blockbuster calls its "extended-view policy"--have accounted for 19% of the company's revenue in the past.

Last night I thought about submitting the bit about IBM reviving the mainframe and, through the z Series, recovering their $1B investment in Linux and 12% growth in sales as companies consolidate server functions back to these babies, but figure it'd get canned, like the submission of the San Fran sidewalk advert bit. Nice return on $100,000 when you think about how much press and video it got in the Bay Area.

CDMA2000 1X promises twice the voice capacity of current networks and data speeds of up to 144 kilobits per second initially. Realistically, Verizon said users should see speeds of 40 to 60 kilobits per second on average. Verizon said it will initially roll out 1X on 20 percent of its networks with nationwide availability by the end of the year. Source

Verison isn't calling it 3G -- the whole point of this article is that they haven't announced it at all. Where are you getting your 20-30k numbers? The Forbes link you gave says it IS 3G, and will provide 40-60kbps in the real world.

I don't think you can consider the prices of materials like that very good indications of the overall economy. As we've seen with actions taken by OPEC, if there is the ability for one supplier, or one group of suppliers, to make artifical changes to the supply, then they can directly change the price. For copper in particular, when the number one supplier (Codelco) announced that they were cutting production for 2002, the announcement "immediately helped pull copper prices back from lows registered earlier". Another classic example is DeBeers, who restrict the supply of diamonds in order to ensure the price is high.

It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation(I don't have to say the name of the Beast, do I?).

Forgot the link:
http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html

Care to share any of those reviews? On CNet
there is nothing useful save 3 user opinions (far too small an n). Forbes reads like nothing more than a press release. Techtv
is also not terribly in depth nor quite so fawning as you suggest.

5 Hours to charge? That seems like a bit of a pain to me. Isn't an iPod somewhere around an hour? 10:1 vs 2:1 play to charge ratio is significant.

-Ted

Here are some:
Forbes Preview
Cnet Top 10 List from CES (Rio Riot is 2nd)
TechTV Preview

It will tie into Microsoft's .NET strategy, delivering video-on-demand

good article at Forbes (free registration required) talking about video on demand and the burgeoning digital cable market.

fake or not, this is the plan that Bill is seeking - a trojan horse in your house that will play games, videos, cable, etc.

Forbes has an article on Fixed Wireless Internet Access services. Fixed wireless ISPs utilize Multipoint Multichannel Distribution Services (MMDS). Interesting read, although the article only covers Sprint's service.

... because they wanted to control it all, including everything on the Olympics.com Web site.

http://www.forbes.com/2000/08/23/feat.html

Forbes covered this two months ago. Basically, because too many providers are splitting up too little bandwidth, cell phone coverage sucks. It's high time the FCC got out of the way and let the stronger players acquire the weaker. Maybe service will improve to the point where I'd actually consider buying a cell phone.

On a related note, I have no sympathy for the companies that overpaid for spectrum licenses nor the greedy Feds who thought they had a chance in hell of collecting all those $billions. Golly, who pays for those license fees? Can you say massive tax on users?

Incidentally, let's all hope that they drop the Newco moniker.

"The big thing we realized is that governments can play a critical role--not in providing the broadband services themselves but in building out a broadband infrastructure," says Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of network projects for Canarie, Canada's advanced Internet development organization. A public/ private consortium, its goal is to have a gigabit broadband connection available to every citizen in Canada by the end of 2005.

Except there hasn't any reduction in sales. Every single year the music industry announces its increase in CD sales

... until Napster was shut down, when they actually recorded a drop in sales. (News articles all used headlines along the lines of "Music sales slide despite Napster demise." This title is clearly biased journalism, as it implies that Napster was hurting music sales. They could have easily used a more neutral title such as "Music sales slide after Napster demise." This title does not imply causality.)

... is of course the S l a s h d o t E f f e c t.

Sooo... congresscritters are thinking of passing a nasty ole law? Rob could just threaten to post a story like "An anonymous coward writes: Streaming video of Natalie Portmans hot grit's posted to the US Congress Web site. "([sic] - TacoLexicon in force. my real grammar is better.)

Congress would naturally cave in and meet all our demands. Well, maybe not RMS's...

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

Forbes magazine had an article last month, showing just how consolidation would help the industry, and the consumers in the US.

Basically, there are too many companies, chasing too many incompatible technologies.

It's a sensible idea, I think. Why would Microsoft allow its products to be used against them? It reminds me of Lenin's famous remark, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Naturally, Microsoft not being stupid, they're not going to let you use their rope that way. Of course, most Slashdotters are against free-market capitalism, so I suppose it's understandable, in a pathetic sort of way, that this would be considered "newsworthy" around here.