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What happened to the idea of the ultrasound as a medical diagnostic procedure?

It died earlier this year when companies started offering "recreational medical imaging" at the mall.

First of all, IBM and HP are two of Sun's biggest competitors. It's not surprising to hear them talk down sun. Sun was started by a couple of true geeks, an mba and a guy with a lot of money and vision. They were always very technology focused and anti microsoft. They worked with open technologies before someone decided to put a capitalize O and S in open source. IBM has a shady reputation, not a lot has changed. IBM will say anything to get their products in the door. I've seen it first hand. This is one of my favorite IBM /Sun stories from a while back.

The Sun/MS thing is a recent occurence. Before that, Sun was doing it's own thing competing against Microsoft. IBM and HP were MS partners the whole time. Who do you think has benefitted more from their relationship with MS, Sun or IBM and HP?

The reason this whole MS/Sun deal came about was because MS was abusing Sun's license on Java. Sun always seemed to be about open standards and level technological playing fields. Their chips are open, they built their OS on open source, they released a lot of open source and published a lot of information to allow compatability and competition. Look at what they're doing with Java. They're trying to keep the process open to all with the JCP so that one vender can't wrestle control. If Sun was as underhanded as you think, they'd at least be the number one or number two java server vendor. They're not. IBM's been trying to get more control over Java for years, not as bad as MS though, but it is a situation that needs to be watched. IBM has recently been championing linux but other than that, how have they supported openness in the past? Have a look at the Compuware suite which was settled for $400 million a couple of months ago.

MS tried to screw that over and take control of the Java market. Sun stood up against MS. Hell, they stood up for all developers that MS has tried to screw. Most of the times MS succeeds. Sun and Oracle really pushed for the anti trust cases here and in Europe. They put a lot of effort into the fight. It really was "Mankind vs Microsoft", not Sun vs Microsoft. MS had screwed over a lot of smaller software companies and now they were getting together to put an end to it, with Sun leading the pack. Oracle was a big player too but none of them were as anti-microsoft as Sun. So after a long, world-wide legal battle, MS loses and gets declared a monopoly. Woohoo! Ok, hold your horses because a new team just came into the Justice Dept and things don't look as rosey as they did before. On top of that IBM and HP have been nipping away at Sun's market share with their own Unix lines as well as using Linux. Now the open source community is starting to boo and hiss at Sun too. The main reason was because Sun liked Solaris better than Linux. Some of Sun's managers might have been a bit colorful but in interviews with developers, including Bill Joy you heard good things about Linux. Sun really didn't say anything about linux that was different from what IBM said about Linux vs AIX back then. What else did they say? Oh yeah, they'd indemnify their customers that use Linux. How is that bad and OSRM not?

With the justice dept dropping the ball, the community that should have been more supportive of Sun being against them and MS having made inroads into Sun's server turf Sun decides to settle. The settlement includes a big fee for infringment as well as an agreement to interoperate better. Sun's customers have been wanting this for a long time. They use Sun and they use Windows. They want them to work together. Not only that, but MS now has to be more cooperative in general. MS has also taken the initiative to end other lawsuits

Forbes would disagree with you:

1. William Gates III
2. Warren Buffett
3. Lakshmi Mittal
4. Carlos Slim Helu
5. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud
6. Ingvar Kamprad
7. Paul Allen
8. Karl Albrecht
9. Lawrence Ellison
10. S Robson Walton

Microsoft no longer offers stock options

Do you think a console manufacturer is ever going to embrace homwbrew software, or will they always do their best to stop it?

While not really a console, there is the Nokia 770 Linux tablet discussed on Slashdot last week. The SDK is a free download and the device has a well documented developers site. Also, at $350 USD is seems reasonably priced too.

20 city, 27 highway. But I get your point.

Over here in the UK, only one operator sells the Treo (Orange) and the others aren't remotely interested in them. As such, Blackberry's heavily outnumber Treo's.

Once I found I could manage my servers with PalmVNC on the Treo, that was it for me.

To be fair, I don't think that really is a killer reason for the majority of people.

Don't forget that Microsoft are also hot on the heels with their SP2 for Exchange 2003 (linky) so this isn't a good time for RIM.

Apple Computer, Inc. (AAPL), beset by angry creditors and faced with not only severe G5 production problems but also a chaotic transition to a new architecture, is on the verge of bankruptcy and total collapse. Apple continues to nosedive into oblivion, as confirmed by industry watchers, investors, and, most painfully, by customers themselves.

As a recent study by Bank of America Securities puts it, Apple ekes out its small existence by peddling new hardware to its existing customers; once those customers are satisfied, Apple will run out of steam . If these disastrous financial forecasts aren't enough, one need only look to Netcraft for confirmation that Apple's market share among Web servers is slowly dwindling down to zero. The market share of Mac OS X is now eclipsed even by that of FreeBSD, another deeply imperiled OS.

But the abysmal server presence of OS X is the least of Apple's worries. Apple's most recent quarterly report indicates a death spiral of cash loss. Indeed, Apple has hemorrhaged some $276 million in the last quarter, while racking up a dizzying $2.4 billion in debt. Revenue from sales of the iPod, the portable music player that is barely keeping Apple afloat in this shipwreck of fiscal woe, declined dramatically, threatening to shrink further an already miniscule lifeline.

Likewise, sales of the eMac, iMac and Power Macintosh G5 lines continue to skid. Apple is unable to secure G5 processors in sufficient numbers to supply its customers with Power Macintosh G5 and iMac computers, as Steve Jobs himself recently admitted, sending Apple stock into a deadly tailspin. The staggering decline in sales numbers confirms it: there is no doubt that one-time Apple customers, dismayed with the floundering ineptitude of their favorite company, have begun turning away in droves, seeking cheaper, faster hardware from manufacturers such as Dell. Apple's frantic effort to regain these customers by shifting to cheap, plentiful Intel processors will not, as many analysts have pointed out, rescue a company already on the brink of disintegration.

Apple teeters on the precipice of doom, one step away from plummeting to its ultimate nadir of bankruptcy, chaos, and implosion. And with the crushing recent news that Steve Jobs has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the forthcoming leadership vacuum and low morale at Apple will only hasten the inevitable. Wise investors will quickly dump AAPL stock and abandon the doomed company, now less than one year away from complete disintegration.

It's time to move to a new platform: Apple is dead.

The LAST thing Apple needs to do is to piss off it's user base.

Well it has:

Apple Takes On Intel
Arik Hesseldahl, 06.06.05, 1:18 PM ET

NEW YORK - Mark your calendars. Today is the day that Apple Computer killed the Mac as we've known it. Today, Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) confirmed reports that it will shift away from using chips from IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) and Freescale Semiconductor (nyse: FSL - news - people ) With the confirmation of the change, Apple is embarking on a transition that could well hurt its computer sales between now and 2007, frustrate software developers and ultimately drive loyal customers away from the platform. The news came in a speech by Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs at a software developers' conference in San Francisco. Switching to Intel may not even save Apple money. "IBM has been losing money in its semiconductor business," says Shaw Wu, analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco. "IBM has given Apple very good price points. I don't think Apple can get a better price from Intel than its getting from IBM. The prices at IBM have been competitive with Intel's prices, because they have had to be." Indeed, since Apple accounts for less than 3% of annual PC sales, it will have a hard time competing for Intel's attention from the likes of Dell (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) and Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ). "Every time Apple tries to make a transition like this, many people simply decide it's not worth the effort to try and keep up," says Nathan Brookwood, analyst with Insight64, Saratoga, Calif. "The companies behind the PC platform have paid a lot of attention to stability and backward compatibility than Apple has." More immediately, by announcing a transition that is going to take place during 2006 and into 2007, Apple can't help but hurt its computer sales during the transition period. In its two most-recent quarters, Apple's computer sales have accounted for about 46% Since Mac users are habitual upgraders, many of its traditional customers will put off purchases until the new Intel-based systems are on the market. This wariness has happened during previous transitions on the Mac platform, when Apple was shifting away from its established Mac OS 9 platform toward the newer Mac OS X. During that period, customers shied away from buying new systems in part because many important software applications weren't available for OS X, in part because the new operating system software wasn't fully baked. "There is a risk of a buying freeze among established customers and new potential customers," Wu says. Then, there's the questions of the developers of the software that has made the Mac the computer-of-choice for so many devoted users--especially designers, videographers and everyone for whom style is as important as substance. Still, many are reserving judgment. "It can be a big deal," says Adam Fingerman, director of Mac software development at Roxio, a unit of Sonic Solutions (nasdaq: SNIC - news - people ), whose products include the Toast line of CD and DVD burning software. "I'd like to believe that Apple has thought all of this out and will make the transition as easy for developers as possible. Apple has already pushed developers through a series of transitions." Apple certainly has the cash to withstand the hit to its sales over the course of a year. It had about $3 billion in cash and cash equivalents, plus another $2.5 billion in short-term investments at the end of the quarter ended March 26. Plus, there's also the iPod business. But the iPod is turning out to be more of a seasonal cash cow. The music player accounted for nearly 35% of sales in the first quarter of 2005, which included the holiday season. While iPod sales were higher by volume in the second quarter, they accounted for a smaller percenta

While the amount the lawyers are getting paid is crazy, keep in mind a few important points.

1) The attorneys involved work on this exclusively for periods of time often exceeding a year or more.
2) They have to pay for research, finding witnesses, deposing testimony...
3) they do all this with no guarantee of any payment.
4) most importantly, without these attorneys the injured parties receive nothing and companies never get called on these things.

for an example of life without see: http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2005/04/14/ap1 947940.html

This car manages to beat a Ferrari to 60mph and can go 280-300 miles at 60mph without recharging. That should be plenty for driving around town.

The T-Zero electric car was already demonstrated as being faster than any Porsches or ferraris than you can throw at it:

http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/collecting/2003/10 /21/cx_dl_1021vow.html

AC-Propulsion Tzero Eliica

Don't forget the most popular portable device of all - the automobile. Just a tenfold increase in battery life (without a corresponding increase in cost) would probably make electric cars a viable option, as well as increase the viability of a plug-in hybrid. In fact, the electric car would probably have a greater range between "refills" than the gasoline car.

In a story I read just today on Forbes.com, three major U.S. auto manufacturers have already created cars powered by fuel cells. Apparently the House of Representatives has passed a bill to "subsidize 15% of the price of fuel cell technology bought by private entities." I'm not sure how easily this technology can be adapted to smaller portable devices, but surely there will be at least some parts of the research which can be reused.

Maybe one improvement which is needed is the electric car batteries need to be more easily removable. Those of us who live in apartments or houses without garages would have quite a bit of trouble with an electric or even a plug-in hybrid without some major infrastructure changes. If the battery were light enough for me to take inside every night, then the only thing stopping me from using an electric is the cost and the range (both battery limitations). As for the plug-in hybrid, the cost of the batteries would be the only problem remaining. And hey, hydrogen is light, so maybe fuel cells is the answer to that :).

Part of the problem is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been lax in granting patents, said Mitchell Kapor, a founder of Lotus Development Corp. and a prominent backer of the Mozilla browser. "There have been tens of thousands of bad software patents issued which never would have been issued if the Patent Office had actually been following its own rules," he said.

Ultimately, these bad patents may come back to haunt the open-source community, he predicted, saying that Microsoft Corp. will eventually be driven to launch wide-ranging patent lawsuits, which he called "patent WMDs" (weapons of mass destruction) against open-source projects. "Their business model no longer holds up in an era where it's clear that open-source is simply an economically superior way to produce software," he said. "Of course they're going go unleash the WMDs. Why would they not?"

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/8757.html
http://www.cio.com/archive/021501/fine.html
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

Most expensive car sold in the US is $558,000.

Your post stated interest off of 1 million. And in America you have to pay tax on interest. No savings account is going to give 3.5% interest monthly. If you thinking savings account or a CD, 5% is probably the highest you can go or maybe 6% a year.

"IS a monopoly" beats "is NOT a monopoly" by almost 6 to 1, if you're asking Google.

Forbes, a magazine about economics which frequently prints Microsoft press releases, reported that "U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, [who] on Nov. 5 ruled Microsoft is a monopoly ". What exercises "monopoly power" that isn't a monopoly? Your dictionary can't help you there.

It would be a lot better for you and your profession if Microsoft weren't a monopoly. But Microsoft is a monopoly, according to The Economist, a magazine about... economics: "judges unanimously ruled that Microsoft holds a monopoly in PC operating-system software". You are an engineer, groping for an irrelevant, disingenuous, self-serving, and finally worthless semantic defense against the consensus of economists, lawyers, and most of your own profession that Microsoft is a monopoly. A status known to professional economists and lawyers better than to your dictionary, but just as well known among your fellow engineers.

That's the last research I do to prove the obvious. If you want more free lessons, ask someone else, or demonstrate that you're capable of benefitting from them.

That explains the (frankly baffling) line taken in the article he wrote yesterday. The article linked in this story is Part Two...

Not sure where you got the price from, but my sources say it's going to be $350.

Jolyon

Low, underhanded, and effective.

And don't even try to make the argument that every other country in the world doesn't behave this way.

We now see those commercials before movies that explain that by pirating movies, we're taking food off the plates of blue collar workers. This may be true, but I don't see Lucas, with his estimates $3 billion ( Forbes )doing much to comfort them. Lucas and many others are capitalizing from the masses by taking in insane amounts of money (not necessarily a bad thing). The funny part is it is those that are making all the money that are making the biggest fuss.
Sure, this is just capitalism working in an unfair way, but so is pirating movies, right?

"You look at the size of this company, and it's one of the big leaders in its market," Mouallem said. "They do a lot to help students get a chance to work with them. It's really promising."

The research firm had estimated that every 1,000 people represents per-share savings of 3 cents to 4 cents for IBM, assuming no loss in revenue.

I've "known" about it for years. But to back it up I provide these links:

Here

Here

Here

Here

and Here

Judging by the dates on these articles, I'd say at least since 2001, but I'd bet it was long before that.

IBM may be bigger (I dunno, and I'm not going to spend time now researching), but they're not a bigger "software" company. IBM does lots of different things - in fact their business goal since 2001 has been to shift focus to services.

just need a spider goat
http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0219/061.html

well, i remain sceptical, but found a reference to the CEO at Forbes magazine - http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0228/062_print.h tml and seems legit....

To further debunk my silly statement, take a look at this Snopes listing. Might as well be complete.

I probably shouldn't have stepped into the issue of correlations with IQ. It seems to correlate very well with test taking, but not so well with factors such as happiness or income. That's my vague recollection when studying for my masters in biology education, anyway. I haven't kept up on the research lately.

For an amusing way to find your IQ based off your SAT score, take a look over here. Since mine is over 140, the intelligent thing to do would clearly be to mod me up.

Because we know that Apple would start foolish lawsuits.

Hi
Agree totaly. I was going to post the same.
So here is a link to the orginal flops article (sorry no link, am tired)
http://forbes.com/infoimaging/2005/05/11/cx_de_051 1starflops.html
Here is the author
David M. Ewalt, 05.11.05, 5:00 PM ET
and his email address
dewalt@forbes.net
Thank you
Jack

I remember this feature from a recent Forbes article on /. (here's the actual link)

At least this time they have some of the text within view (to the right of the image) so that the user knows that there's extra stuff being missed. Check out the slideshow/article from the above linked thread to see what I mean - you could easily miss the entire description for each item.

A potentially nice feature being routinely misapplied. At least we can learn from their mistake.

Note: I'm viewing at 1024x768.

If you click stop, it stops, but when you click next, it starts again. However, if you click slow down, it keeps the same speed when you click next. So, solution is to set a very very long interval. This link does this:
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html?thisSpeed=4294967295

To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:

http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_3.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_4.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_5.html

There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.

To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:

http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_3.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_4.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_5.html

There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.

To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:

http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_3.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_4.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_5.html

There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.

To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:

http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_3.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_4.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_5.html

There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.

To avoid having the pages advance, turn off JavaScript, and try these links individually:

http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_3.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_4.html
http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_5.html

There is a slide 6 but it's devoid of useful content, and broken to boot.

Since Apple and Motorola are delivering a iTMS based player/phone here soon. If I were Bill, I would be a bit worried being late to market, again (Longhorn) ;-)
Get Ready To Call ITunes Dec 2004
Here is a pre-production picture of it

Try this. That should effectively stop the slide show.

Try this link instead. It'll still skip forward, but it waits a while longer.

Ok, I found a way to slow it down: Click here. It doesn't stop the slide show, just gives you 600 seconds per page instead of 6. That should be enough time (and you can always click next and previous, anyway).

It is auto naving, http://forbes.com/technology/2005/05/10/cx_mh_star warscienceslide_2.html?thisSpeed=6000 for some reason the webadmin thought 6 seconds would be enough to read the page.

Book: Hard News : The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, by Seth Mnookin
Beyond the obvious fraud commited by Jayson Blair, Mnookin delves into what was wrong in the NYT newsroom and managerial organization that allowed Blair to get away with it. In short: an imperious Howell Raines alienated his subordinate editors and the communications process broken down, allowing a "charismatic crook" to slip past the checks and balances that normally would catch him.

Movie: Shattered Glass, starring *cough* Hayden Christensen
At the New Republic, Stephen Glass was able to subvert their fact checking process -- starting with occasionally making up quotes, he ended up fabricating entire stories out of whole cloth. The Forbes Digital investigation that finally brought him down will likely be interesting to readers here ...

I'm purposely not reading the comments on this thread, because the naivety exhibited will certainly make my head spin, and I need to get back to work. In short, just like the typical Slashdot reader knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of IT than a journalist, the journalism professional knows a hell of a lot more about the subtleties of journalism ethics than 99% of Slashdot readers.

And above all, spend a little time reading "hard" journalism once in while (even online versions of the old media, like NYT, WP, etc.) and get a feel for what rigorous journalism looks like. Blogs have their own set of problems that you may be blind to if you never read "real" reporting ...

Microsoft is about likely to go under as IBM(...)

According to Lou Gerstner, IBM was dangerously close to the edge. Read (about) his book about getting elephants to dance; you can find enough info on the web, for instance here.

nice quote: "Gerstner says that few people even understood how perilously close the firm was to running out of cash."

Intel: Microsoft dropping IA64/Itanium support in WinXP/Win2003/Clusters etc.
HP: Microsoft attempted to use OEM licensing agreement to use for free HPs intellectual property.
Cisco : Microsoft's planned Network Access Protection (NAP) technology.
AMD : At first Microsoft made a big deal about XBox2 having an AMD CPU, now using 3.5+ GHz IBM PowerPC.
AT+T : Going back in the past a bit, but Microsoft orignally attempted to sell Xenix as a pure clone without paying fees to AT+T for the use of the orignal Unix code. Microsoft had to back down.

strlen mentioned in another topic that there's an OpenBSD-based firewall product which sounds like it may cut down on the task significantly. The upside is that it will save you tons of time in managing a network of that side -- I'd hesitate to call it a "small" network. 500 machines sounds like a full-time job depending on how much hand-holding you do. The downside is that it's about a $20K product, though that works out to be a bargain at $40 per station. However, it certainly sounds interesting and maybe that link will give you a start for a completely free version which you can build yourself if you have the time and knowledge.

As anyone going over to Google News can easily find out, this as already been denied by Mr. McNealy himself ...

See Forbes, for example.

Actually, they didn't win against Apple Records. There have been several lawsuits, and Apple Computers tends to settle for various large sums of money. http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/12/cx_ah_0912aapl.ht ml

Of course, they've had problems with the Beatles since day one, due to Apple Records. Initially, there was an agreement that Apple Computers could use the Apple name only for computer products--not music-related enterprises. Can you say "iPod"? http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/12/cx_ah_0912aapl.ht ml

That and more sinister explanantions regarding the desires of the parent corp, The Canopy Group. Check out this report. While much is BS, it is interesting in what it says about Canopy. There is something to be said for your explanation as Yarro was fired. Though some deals were made between SCO and Microsoft.

So tell me why Apple remains stagnant at 3% of the desktop market and it's biggest commercial success in years has been the iPod.

Simple, it's not stagnant.

Forbes Magazine: The conversion rate of iPod customer base to the Macintosh platform from PC "implies two points of global PC market share gain for Apple in 2005," to 5% from 3%, said Morgan Stanley, adding that the conversion rate for iPod owners could track closer to the 25% range going forward from 19%.

http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/03/18/0318autom arketscan10.html