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Never assume such things cannot happen. Actually, Deutsche Telekom (Germany's telecommunications monopolist) is sueing a small company (not even a competitor) for usage of the letter T.

They have been unsuccessful in sueing companies for usage of the color magenta in the past, though.

Has there really been a court-case in Germany which stopped SCO from unproven claims about copyright violation in Linux - on the grounds of law against unfair/untruthful marketing?

Yes. A court ordered SCO not to make these claims against Linux until they could be proven in a full court case. To avoid a public court case in Germany, SCO signed a contract saying that they will pay 250.000 Euro if they continue such claims and took their German web site off-line.

A German article with Babelfish translation, another English article.

Several people submitted this story at the time, but somehow it got rejected.

http://www.heise.de/mobil/artikel/2003/07/03/umts/

German article (from November 2001) about a bug in Intel's C compiler when using inter procedural optimization (-ipo) with an example from Povray

Actually, a lot of the cost is that of the switch and the re-training. I suspect that in 5, 10 years, when the next technology switch is to be done, the price for keeping Linux will be ridiculously low. One has to keep in mind that "long term" usually means just some five years maximum in this area.

I also suspect that no such complete technology switch will have to be done - Upgrades are much more smooth with Linux. Take Debian or RedHat - you can upgrade just the software when a new release comes out, and keep everything in place; most things will still work afterwards, and no re-configuration is necessary...

By the way, the details of Unilogs study can be found at
the city of Munich's website ; unfortunately it's in German. But you can try to babelfish the summary at the Heise news site .

heise.de

08/01/2001:
NTT to install 100 Mbit lines in the living room

So, this is not really new news. Besids the fee.

There must have been a /.-Story as well

German headline follows:

NTT legt 100-MBit-Leitungen bis ins Wohnzimmer

NTT will heute einen Glasfaser-Breitbanddienst starten, der Übertragungsraten von bis zu 100 MBit/s schaffen soll. Nach einem Bericht von EETimes will die japanische Telefongesellschaft diesen Service den Endkunden für einen Grundpreis von deutlich unter 200 Mark pro Monat anbieten.

Reason for this change is that a InfiniteReality4 can calculate 3 millionen polygons/s, a ATI chip can do about 10 millionen polygons/s in immediate mode or 75 millionen polygons/s in display list mode.

More information in this article, translation here.

Tulip to intensify marketing of the Commodore brand

According to estimates by the Dutch computer maker Tulip, owner of the Commodore trademark, there are still approximately six million loyal Commodore users world-wide. This community is said to use countless web sites for information or software downloads. 300 commercial web sites are reported to use the "Commmodore" (sic) and "Commodore 64" denominations without license. The unauthorized use of these trademarks shall no longer be tolerated in the future.

Tulip and Ironstone Partners Ltd, the anglo-canadian games rightsholder, have agreed that the latter will build an official C64 portal, the proceeds from which are to be shared with Tulip. Ironstone is to market the official C64 emulator through the new portal. In the months to come, Tulip intends to release new hardware using the emulator. The agreement intends to give the go-ahead to an entire network of strategic alliances, promising "almost unlimited opportunities for e-commerce." (mw/c't)

Hella Cool Beans?

if you are fluent in german, try this. maybe your babelfish will help, or someone wants to waste some time and provides a translation..?

the pictures do in a way speak for themselves. :)

it's "heise" news. It's actually pretty much the only IT-specific news publisher that isn't Scheisse, even if some facts they report are Scheiße (such as anything SCO-related. The two first letters of sco actually mean Scheisse)
And since recently, there's also a special "heise security" news about IT security:

heise newsticker:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/


heise security:
http://www.heise.de/security/

it's "heise" news. It's actually pretty much the only IT-specific news publisher that isn't Scheisse, even if some facts they report are Scheiße (such as anything SCO-related. The two first letters of sco actually mean Scheisse)
And since recently, there's also a special "heise security" news about IT security:

heise newsticker:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/


heise security:
http://www.heise.de/security/

What would happen if Philipps started sueing all the companies that produce 'copy-protected' CDs (also called "Un-CDs" in German, see CD register from the publisher of the well-known c't magazine (in German)) for using the word 'CD' which is very, very probably copy-righted?

The article is from the 26th of June and states that the proposal is due for parliamentary vote on June 30th (earlier than originally planned).

However, the vote has been postponed and is not going to take place on June 30th, at least according to more recent reports by the usually well-informed German heise.de news service.

heise.de news article (in German)

This seems to contradict the article at least in spirit and gives the Open Source/Free Software community more time to gain momentum and turn the vote into the right direction.

Those lobbying in favour of software patents wanted to have the final vote next week. But it has now been decided (sorry, link in German) that it will be held in September, as planned originally.

More details (in German): heise.de

I'm sick and tired of articles about interesting things happening in Germany being written in German. Every German I've ever met spoke perfect English, so why can't you guys just drop the parochial attitude and start publishing all your stuff in God's Own Tongue?

p.s. Is it true that the reason that Germans have no sense of humor is due to the fact that part of their ancestry includes Black Forest trolls?

More details (in German):
heise.de

Xeon, we must add, has SMT (HyperThreading) which shouldn't help at all with SPEC data sets, but should help with real performance.

Here. Picture after 15 hours of burn-in and 51 hours of uninterupted reconditioning.

Here. Citing a paper in the New Scientist that says autistic infants have less mercury in hair samples than "normal" children.

The German magazine "Telepolis" (from Heise.de) has an interesting article about SARS in the USA.

The other quote that I can't get out of my head is from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto explains his reservations about attacking Pearl Harbor as ordered by the military junta: ...it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. Substitute "IBM" for "Americans", and you have my feelings exactly.

God, I love that book.

According to this (German) article, volume licensing at a discount is available. I would assume 50 Euro per seat. Note that SuSE generally offers university discounts of about 30 percent.

With 6000 participants, the double-blind public test results were:

1. Ogg
2. WMA
3. RealAudio
4. Mp3Pro
5. MP3
6. AAC (Sic!)

WDR (Radio+Television), WDR, Heise Newsticker, Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf (Regional Government), Chaos Computer Club Duesseldorf (many more links), CCC's anti censorship tutorial (and more links)

There are protests, but the regional government has chosen its first targets wisely: Only nazi sites are to be blocked even though the law applies to a much wider range of content (The law doesn't really afford this censorship in my opinion, but if one thinks it can be used against nazi sites, then it could also be used against many other sites.) Since there is a broad consensus against nazis, protesters are easily discredited as nazi sympathizers.

SCO's German website is down. A German court had ordered them to stop telling that Linux contains stolen code or to pay a fine of 250,000 Euro. And since everybody at SCO is now busy fighting lawsuits, the had no time to remove only the FUD from their webpage. Consequently they removed the whole website in order to follow the court's order.

Oh, and a German artice about this can be found here

The whole "unauthorized" release thing is interesting, though. I'd say that they have to prove that it wasn't an official release as it certainly looked like one. But what if somebody infiltrates Microsoft and puts sections of the Windows source on the web site under the GPL?

Slashdot's product placement and trolling stepped up while European legislators were discussing software patents. Picayune articles, many of which consisted of rehashed softer versions of old FUD and misinformation, covered topics which have already been dealt with, again and again.

Since most novices do not understand the scope and severity of MS's problems and since any critique of MS, no matter the merit, gets written off as "MS-Bashing", it would be best to focus on the more successful areas of the IT sector. Here are a few examples:

• in Norway
• OSS in the mainstream
• Munich goes OpenOffice
• OSS in the UK
• OSS in Spain

Check the forums for tools that work - *BSD, Linux, QNX, Netware, eDirectory, LDAP, Kerberos, KDE, Gnome, Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, and so on ...

> You don't build the local economy by sending millions to Redmond Washington

Unfortunately, not all city governments in Germany think that way. The city of Frankfurt just signed a major contract with Microsoft, according to this news report from German c't magazine. Oh well, you win some, you lose some - but the decision made by the Munich authorities is a landmark case which gets much more publicity worldwide.

In short: the vote is over, Linux won. :-) story, Babelfish

Cheers, Ulli

Heise Newsticker reports http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-27.05.03-0 01/ that Frankfurt (Germany) sticks with Microsoft products and just signed contracts to use MS products in the future. I consider this perfectly timed. The Munich Stadtrat hasn't decided yet on going the Linux way (so far it is just a recommendation) and another big city in Germany stays on Microsofts side. Wonder how far Munichs decision will be influenced by that!

when you click a few links, you get to the story about the actual study, which says:
Microsoft-Kunden müssen jetzt jährlich für Software-Lizenzen bezahlen. Bei den 10.000 städtischen PCs käme eine Summe von zirka 4,5 Millionen Euro zusammen.
in english:
Microsoft clients now have to pay a yearly software licence. with the 10000 PCs that would be around 4.5 million euro.

exactly why this article talks about 10000 computers, and the other one about 14000, i don't know

Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux

Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)

Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.

The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.

About 14000 client computers are involved.

The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.

The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:

• Study suggests that Linux is cheaper than Windows for Munich: - story, Babelfish
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer interrupts his skiing trip to talk to Munich politians: story, Babelfish
• Suddently a new study says that because Microsoft gave huge discounts, Windows is now better than Linux for Munich: story, Yoda
• IBM also modifies their offer (see main story above)

Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux

Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)

Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.

The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.

About 14000 client computers are involved.

The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.

The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:

• Study suggests that Linux is cheaper than Windows for Munich: - story, Babelfish
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer interrupts his skiing trip to talk to Munich politians: story, Babelfish
• Suddently a new study says that because Microsoft gave huge discounts, Windows is now better than Linux for Munich: story, Yoda
• IBM also modifies their offer (see main story above)

Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux

Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)

Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.

The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.

About 14000 client computers are involved.

The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.

The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:

• Study suggests that Linux is cheaper than Windows for Munich: - story, Babelfish
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer interrupts his skiing trip to talk to Munich politians: story, Babelfish
• Suddently a new study says that because Microsoft gave huge discounts, Windows is now better than Linux for Munich: story, Yoda
• IBM also modifies their offer (see main story above)

Munich will be the first city with over 1 Million inhabitants that is run by Linux

Heise has the story (Babelfish may help you)

Short facts are: The actual vote will occur on wednesday, but the SPD and Green party hold 43 out of 80 seats and have both committed to vote in favour of Linux to be used in the government of Munich, a city of about 2 million inhabitants.

The main reason for the migration was "strategic-quality reasons" and to support competition in software, not cost, which was said to be about the same for Linux and Windows.

About 14000 client computers are involved.

The used distribution will be SuSE, but IBM is also involved. OpenOffice will be used as office suite.

The earlier happenings are also quite exciting:

• Study suggests that Linux is cheaper than Windows for Munich: - story, Babelfish
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer interrupts his skiing trip to talk to Munich politians: story, Babelfish
• Suddently a new study says that because Microsoft gave huge discounts, Windows is now better than Linux for Munich: story, Yoda
• IBM also modifies their offer (see main story above)

Look at Telepolis, or at the german bamboo site, and loads of others in yet other languages. Thomas Nagel

It refers to an article in the Wall Street Journal that I can't find.

Is this for real? Wouldn't it be that MS just got one licence?

... because Sharp actually did issue the news in a language more comprehensible to this audience either:
Linux "clamshell" PDAs with an Intel Xscale PXA255@400MHz, 64 megs of RAM and up to 128 megs of built-in flash are only some of the mouth-watering specs for the new SL-C760 and C750, just released in English to make geeks world-wide wish they were in Japan - the only place, again, for which Sharp has announced to market the new models. The predecessor, widely acclaimed for its excellent "Continuous Grain Silicon" VGA LCD, has been made available by third parties in the USA, Germany, and directly from Japan, but if you're looking to replace e.g. your aging Psion with the latest and greatest Linux PDA from a local vendor, you may want to get Sharp to change their mind and make it available world-wide this time.
In other news, in India the Simputer is expected to be shipping below US$200 (10000 rupies) soon.
Wouldn't both of these be rather compelling items for ThinkGeek to carry as well (just in case the current vendors get overwhelmed by Slashdotters buying up the equivalent of a monthly production - BTW, what's the discount at 30000 units) ?

I work in the embedded market and it is the standard.

Our partner-company was a 100% Microsoft-shop and Linux is forbidden in the corporate LAN - yet they still chose Linux as their platform for *ALL* their new devices.

What about VXworks? PalmOS? QNX? Are these people quaking in their boots?

Yes they are. You can get big discounts from everybody.

What about all the special purpose real time OSes that many companies use.

Used in many existing devices, but for most new developments, a real OS is chosen for shorter development time. (the hardware is fast enough already)

Linux isn't the standard in the embedded market any more than it is the standard on the desktop.

Laughable. According to this study: here Linux (+ BSD) was running on 11% of existing systems in 2001, but was used for 50% of new projects.

I can only confirm these developments, Linux is already the de-facto standard on embedded systems.

For Norah Jones it has only one entry: Come Away With Me. I'm not sure if that's the album the guy from the article tried to play.

• Abspielen = play
• Auslesen = rip
• ja = yes
• nein = no

For Norah Jones it has only one entry: Come Away With Me. I'm not sure if that's the album the guy from the article tried to play.

• Abspielen = play
• Auslesen = rip
• ja = yes
• nein = no

Ah, right. Some german has already done this in order to shut down the noise (call it music, he doesn't though) coming out of cars.

Btw he writes for a popular german computer magazine (hence the site URL). The page is written in German, but if you look at the pictures, you'll get the idea.

If you can read German, look here
Or, summarised in English:
1st No updates of RedHat Advanced Server.
2nd No new Samba version.
3rd No new kswapd (should especially speed up performance under high load).
4th Original Samba version got difficulties, used even older ones, but did not ask RedHat for any help.
5th Tuning of Windows using Registry-Key "Disablelastaccess", but did not use corresponding mount-Option "noatime" for the used ext3 file system.
6th ext3 uses a much more sophisticated journaling of the file system, but they did not set the mount option "data=writeback" to have similar conditions.
7th Very old LinUX kernel (over one year old, with known limits of this kernel for high load environments - do you remember all these 2.4.xy problems because of the virtual memory!?).
8th Redhat provides solutions to the most of the described problems, but they did not use these updates or that help.
9th They did not really try to tune Samba and used mostly the default settings.

Well, I doubt that it's 100% effective. The more complicated something is, the more can go wrong. Heat signature and capacitative sensors can be foiled quite easily, see this article, for example.

Even if you have a 100% effective scanner that never has a false positive, and can tell a real finger from anything else, you still have a problem: The system doesn't know your finger. It knows the data produced from your finger. Feed it to the system in any other way, and it's going to accept it just fine. It doesn't matter if it's difficult, somebody will figure it out sooner or later. When somebody can impersonate you it will create big problems. You may not believed because "the system is perfect", or in any case will have to use other fingers, and you don't have an infinite amount of them.

See article (unfortunately only its beginning, and without illustrations) if you understand German. Reading the full thing (very thorough) in the print version, you'll learn that WM9 'wins', closely followed by Real's latest codec.

They went right after someone who could afford to defend themselves, instead of trashing say, SuSe and RedHat.

SCO said that after they're done with IBM, they'll sue SuSE and Redhat (German).

"Some were produced, sure, but they were not workable in that they were expensive. In the real world price is an integral component of usability."

"You're right, DEC wasn't any of those things."

"People used to buy Alphas because they were bloody fast. But they lost that advantage by not keeping up with their otherwise inferior competitors."

"Took a whole quarter in at school. I hated it then"

"particularly when you had to pay for the CPU by the second"

"beginning programmers can grok procedural programming faster than functional programming."

According to this blind listening test conducted by c't magazine, AAC at 128kbps was ranked the lowest of all codecs sampled at that bitrate (WAV, OGG, WMA, RA, MP3Pro and MP3)... One can always hope that the claims of Apple making their AACs directly from the record masters are true, as this would help the situation some.

Of course it can run linux, I've seen some really bored people get linux to run on just about anything. If someone can get linux to run on an xbox or even a fucking Nintendo some bright individual will figure this out as well