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See: Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act

Information Week raised some of the issues: Quality vs. Deception in Managing IRDs

In a pilot project, Microsoft will be selling a skeletal Windows Starter Edition in asian countries Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Priced lower as an effort to reduce the attraction of piracy and compete with Linux. More details in this InformationWeek article.

I have found that Ms. Aftab is somewhat less than an expert on technology issues. I think that this may be due to a lack of desire or ability to perform any rigerous thought. Just consider the following article written for information week http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=16000567.

I had some real issues with this article and challenged her in the discussion thread http://www.informationweek.com/forum/showReplies.j html?sid=300001&fid=601011&tid=123900011.

I'm sure you will be able to figure out which person I am ;-)

I wouldn't feel very threatened by Ms. Aftab. I have known alot of lawyers in my life and Ms. Aftab's ability to present a cogent argument (at least to me) paled in comparison to the abilities of other lawyers I know.

I have found that Ms. Aftab is somewhat less than an expert on technology issues. I think that this may be due to a lack of desire or ability to perform any rigerous thought. Just consider the following article written for information week http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=16000567.

I had some real issues with this article and challenged her in the discussion thread http://www.informationweek.com/forum/showReplies.j html?sid=300001&fid=601011&tid=123900011.

I'm sure you will be able to figure out which person I am ;-)

I wouldn't feel very threatened by Ms. Aftab. I have known alot of lawyers in my life and Ms. Aftab's ability to present a cogent argument (at least to me) paled in comparison to the abilities of other lawyers I know.

Suit Charges Search Companies With Aiding Online Gambling Aug. 5, 2004

More Stories on:
Industries

The class-action suit filed in San Francisco names 13 companies, including Yahoo and Google.

I saw this link on her blog and I get the feeling that she has a lot of first dates.

Oh ya, they dont want bad PR.

Riiiiiiiight.

DRDOS
Windows95 Registration Wizard
Bundling Antitrust
NSAKEY
Windows Product Activation

Etc. Etc. Etc. Me thinks their image is just a bit beyond repair at this point

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=12808118

Let me contribute some working URLs:
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/crimelaw/ features/n_8815/
http://www.securitypipeline.com/policy_privacy/182 01365
http://www.nyls.edu/pages/1363.asp
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=10700824
HTH.

Closer to home, I have a keyboard that still functions after numerous fizzy, sugar-loaded beverages have been spilled into it. Some keys need to be pounded a little harder than normal, but I'm not replacing it until my son either: 1)develops better hand-to-mouth coordination while playing Quidditch; or 2)finally lets all the magic smoke out...

individuals who invest in Silver Lake, called limited partners, who might be of most interest to Gartner clients. According to Silver Lake, they include more than 150 "leading technology executives from the top technology firms." Some of the names you might recognize: Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Bill Gates.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=15800394

Despite recent good news on employment growth, the current economic recovery, now approaching its third year, remains the most unbalanced on record in respect to the distribution of income gains between corporate profits and labor compensation. Essentially, rapid gains in productivity have been translating into higher corporate profits without increasing the wage and salary income of American workers.

or:

In the new millennium, as the use of intelligent computers increase, jobs will vanish, with several million expected to disappear over the next five to seven years, Cohen said. While less labor to do more work is great for business, there will be an impact on society as people find decent paying jobs harder to find.

Apathy&Denial's my middle name.

--

from InformationWeek

Need I say that's pretty beefy!

Information Week had an article last week about banks urging IT companies to take security seriously, or else...
Security-related claims are estimated to cost up to $1bn a year to the financial industry. No wonder they were getting pissed.

Which is a good thing, because MS is a 800lb gorilla in the IT industry, but a midget compared to Bank of America or Citigroup. Hence MS has got to listen when their industry-wide e-commerce arm (the BITS) speaks up.

Information Week had an article last week about banks urging IT companies to take security seriously, or else...
Security-related claims are estimated to cost up to $1bn a year to the financial industry. No wonder they were getting pissed.

Which is a good thing, because MS is a 800lb gorilla in the IT industry, but a midget compared to Bank of America or Citigroup. Hence MS has got to listen when their industry-wide e-commerce arm (the BITS) speaks up.

Here are some. Some may be a year or so old, and I don't recall what links I sent as examples. Google should help you find all you need.

Microsoft software "riddled with vulnerabilities", trade body claims
30 unpatched holes in IE, says security researcher
Credit card theft feared in Windows flaw | CNET News.com
Microsoft Issues Five New Security Warnings
Microsoft WinXP Update spies on other PC software
Microsoft issues patch for "serious" XP hole
Microsoft Windows Insecure by Design (TechNews.com)
Server attacks stump Microsoft
Windows flaw threatens PC services
Gartner: Worms Jack Up the Total Cost of Windows
CERT recommends anything but IE
Exploiting design flaws in the Win32 API for privilege escalation
Worm Exploits Multiple Windows Vulnerabilities
Unpatched Internet Explorer Bugs

original article link

Technology that adds intelligence to computers poses a far more serious threat to jobs than low-wage countries, a research firm said Friday.

This threatens "warm-body" jobs, the thinking/judgement jobs that require people at the current and forthcoming stages of tech are the ones at risk for offshoring.

The first wave of job-killing technology occurred in manufacturing in the 1990s, when computer-driven robotics introduced across industries from automaking to steel made it possible to produce more product with fewer people, Strategy Analytics said in a recent analysis of emerging technologies.

In the second wave, workers in customer service, help desk, directory assistance, and other support activities in businesses will be replaced by computers that have enough intelligence to handle repetitive tasks that occur during human interaction.

[That's already going on, and it isn't working all that well. Even directory assistance occasionally requires human judgement sometimes. Customer support often requires more than the ability to walk a customer through a fault tree. The weakest point of this kind of is the 5-10% of the tasks that require that somebody think of an answer or go to a different database that isn't connected to the system or call somebody who's outside it. Basically, exception processing is the hard part, and people who design these systems generally don't get this. If you can build a system that handles things without humans 95% of the time and call a better trained/paid human for the parts that require thinking outside the automated system's box, it's "good enough".]

In the manufacturing sector in the 90s, companies sold $100 billion worth of software and hardware for robotics, said Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics. While the technology increased productivity and added to companies' bottom lines, it also eliminated 10 million jobs worldwide.

[since nobody noticed, I assume that this mainly cut into job growth]

In the new millennium, as the use of intelligent computers increase, jobs will vanish, with several million expected to disappear over the next five to seven years, Cohen said. While less labor to do more work is great for business, there will be an impact on society as people find decent paying jobs harder to find.

No, it's the minimum wage warm-body jobs which are at primary risk from this kind of automation. Decent paying has nothing to do about it unless you consider Walmart a good-paying job.

Technology "will take the job growth out of the industries that the government has said are good places to develop employment," Cohen said. "So we've raised the question, have they thought this problem through properly?"

NO, and they aren't going to until something like the fast-food industry goes automated all at once. I'm surprised that this hasn't already happened, the problem was basically solved back in the late 1980s. The problems with respect to automating the tasks low-level health care workers are being worked on in Japan. The problems are mostly much harder than he believes and will take longer than he expects to have a substantial impact on the low-paying jobs.

While technology isn't replacing large numbers of people in non-manufacturing industries today, it's expected to in time, with the initial impact showing up as slower job growth and stagnant wages.

[I'm expecting negative job growth *and some wage increases along with increased skill levels*, especially in the newly automated areas. One guy might be able to supervise 20 janitorial robots, but he'd better know more than how to use a mop and bucket if his employers actually want all 20 working at the same ti

Here's a no reg required copy of the AP article.

link to a copy of this article hosted by Information Week

United States, 56.74%

Canada, 6.80%

China (including Hong Kong), 6.24%

But this "thespamweblog" article from November 2003 shows:

UNCTAD estimates that the majority of spam victims are in the USA but it also says that in March 2003 the USA was the source of 58.4% of spam, followed at a great distance by China (5.6%), the United Kingdom (5.2%), Brazil (4.9%) and Canada (4.1%).

The same source report (along with sources of digital attacks was mentioned in theInquirer. I'm sure if I kept tracking links in google, I'd find other reports and other percentages.

Maybe recent US lawsuits have, within a few months, forced most spammers off shore or perhaps it's just part of the offshoring of US [SPAMMER] jobs.
;-/

In regards to my sig, a bit of dark thoughts: imagine if China became a strict Moslem nation. If stealing incurs the lost of a hand, I could see the penalty for sending spam to be the loss of one finger for each separate mailing. Of course the worker would be fined and their boss. Eventually that might make a dent in spam. >:=}>

-l

Excellent post on Langa's talkback forum

It seems that wasn't his goal at all. People in his forums were bending over backward to try and help him, and he eventually capitulates to say "I didn't want your help"... So in essence he's saying 'well crap on you people who offer free support, I just want it to work". So it doesn't matter whether the responses were genuine, 'rtfm', 'pebkac' or even 'stfu', he doesn't want "our" help.

Isn't 'It just works' the sort of attitude that should be driving him to get a powermac ;)

Fred posted his hardware specs on April 20th in this thread on the Information Week forums.

-Mike

If true, it simply underlines Langa's inexperience with a different environment, as he's clearly a Windows user and not familiar with the *nix world.

= 9J =

The hardware is a new (Dec 2003 mfg) P4 from Intel; 3.2GHz, 1GB or RAM; Nvidia video, onboard sound and NIC. The onboard NIC is detected fine by Linux. The onboard sound is not.

As detected by various sniffers:

sisoft sandra:
Model : D865GLC
Intel ICH4 Audio Device : Sound Adapter (Enabled)
Chipset: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P
Device Name : SoundMAX Digital Audio

[btw:several distros specifically claim compatibility with Intel ICH4; but they did not work on this system. I alluded to this in the text.]

Belarc:
SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio
D865GLC Intel

aida32
SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio (Intel D865GLC) PCI
Motherboard Chipset Intel Springdale-G i865G

Tell you what, Craig, you cut your salary and benefits instead of cutting jobs in the country that made you rich, then we might be more inclined to not call you a traitor.

Excellent question. Maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too tight, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's management to have a plan akin to this: "Hey, go out and make Microsoft look good. Speak as individuals. Tell the world that we're really NOT the Evil Empire."

Microsoft has tried to manipulate public opinion of them before. Maybe they're just getting more subtle. When the big money doesn't work, go soft-touch.

I would think the longer this drags on, the worse it is for SCO. They only have finite money (and some people already want that money back), eventualy they will be unable to finance continued litigation.

Linux, and OSS in general, does not seem to be suffering a significant (or even noticable) negative backlash from all of this, if anything it has been free publicity.

CD-RWs are expected to last about 25 years under ideal conditions (i.e. you write it once and then leave it alone). Repeated rewrites will ccelerate
this. In general, CD-RW media isn't recommended for long-term backups or archives of valuable data.

The rest of this section applies to CD-R.

The manufacturers claim 75 years (cyanine dye, used in "green" discs), 100 years (phthalocyanine dye, used in "gold" discs), or even 200 years
("advanced" phthalocyanine dye, used in "platinum" discs) once the disc has been written. The shelf life of an unrecorded disc has been estimated at
between 5 and 10 years. There is no standard agreed-upon way to test discs for lifetime viability. Accelerated aging tests have been done, but they may not provide a meaningful analogue to real-world aging.

Exposing the disc to excessive heat, humidity, or to direct sunlight will greatly reduce the lifetime. In general, CD-Rs are far less tolerant of environmental conditions than pressed CDs, and should be treated with greater care. The easiest way to make a CD-R unusable is to scratch the
top surface. Find a CD-R you don't want anymore, and try to scratch the top (label side) with your fingernail, a ballpoint pen, a paper clip, and
anything else you have handy. The results may surprise you.

Keep them in a cool, dark, dry place, and they will probably live longer than you do (emphasis on "probably"). Some newsgroup reports have complained of discs becoming unreadable in as little as three years, but without knowing how the discs were handled and stored such anecdotes are
useless. Try to keep a little perspective on the situation: a disc that degrades very little over 100 years is useless if it can't be read in your
CD-ROM drive today.

One user reported that very inexpensive CD-Rs deteriorated in a mere six weeks, despite careful storage. Some discs are better than others.

An interesting article by Fred Langa (of http://www.langa.com/) on http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=15800263&pgno=1
describes how to detect bad discs, and discusses whether putting an adhesive label on the disc causes them to fail more quickly.

By some estimates, pressed CD-ROMs may only last for 10 to 25 years, because the aluminum reflective layer starts to corrode after a while.

One user was told by Blaupunkt that CD-R discs shouldn't be left in car CD players, because if it gets too hot in the car the CD-R will emit a gas that can blind the laser optics. However, CD-Rs are constructed much the same way and with mostly the same materials as pressed CDs, and the temperatures required to cause such an emission from the materials that are exposed would
melt much of the car's interior. The dye layer is sealed into the disc, and should not present any danger to drive optics even if overheated.
Even so, leaving a CD-R in a hot car isn't good for the disc, and will probably shorten its useful life.

See also http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/ Longevity.html,
especially http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Industry/news/media-ch ronology.html about some inaccurate reporting in the news media.

See "Do gold CD-R discs have better longevity than green discs?" on http://www.mscience.com/faq53.html.

Actualy, Home Depot uses linux, too. Here are a couple of links. One Two

I spoke with IDC for a short article I'm writing on this release for InformationWeek. The difference between IDC's figures (32%) and those of anti-spam vendors like Brightmail (63%) comes from the sample. IDC's sample included internal corporate mail sent by respondents to each other. As might be expected, mail sent from employee to employee tends to include fewer mentions of Viagra. Brightmail's statistics are based on mail traversing the Net.

The last line of the article is:

Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.

That's plainly wrong. Even if it's easier to get Windows to use soundcards, just try to get WindowsXP to run on a PowerPC, StrongARM, or Alpha CPU, and then tell me if it has broader hardware support than Linux.

However, there is a major flaw in Linux's sound-card support that this author doesn't mention. In my experience, it's reasonably easy to get Linux+ALSA to recognize common modern sound cards. But due to the design of the sound-card interface, the performance from then on is inadequate. Mainstream linux programs that need to output audio write to the /dev/dsp pseudo-file directly, rather than passing their requests through some user-space program. This means that contention for the device can cause unpredictable failures in multiple applications. (Where by "failure" I mostly mean one program is totally hung until another quits)

Compare this with the video card situation on Linux: only oddball applications would consider writing to the VGA card directly. All normal programs write either to X11 or the console "stdout", which allows a user-space program to handle the distributing those visual needs to the graphics card in a fair manner.

As long as Linux programs continue to access sound directly, they will be inadequate with much audio hardware. But there's still little movement towards adopting an accepted alternative sound interface. There are multiple competitors for the role- primarily esound, artsd, and JACKS- but none of those appears close to universal acceptance. (And they all have problems that might keep them from ever winning the standardization race)

I'm sure the responses in the discussion of this article have already touched on these points, but here it goes:

none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.

I think the above empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.

Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.

1.) We have no way of judging the competence of this user with respect to Linux. Just because he got it working in Windows - sometimes with "from CD" drivers, means only that he knows how to setup hardware in Windows. Does he know he'll need to manually enable kernel modules in Debian with modconf? Did he know what he should be searching for in usenet? Granted, these are things that average user will not know or want to know, but I strongly suspect this author has a much stronger grasp of the Windows way of doing things.

2.) If his hardware is "new" as he claims - it wouldn't really be fully supported in win9x. But because he (IIRC) never gave the card type, we won't know just how "well" it worked in Windows.

3.) Most Windows users do not install their own OS and do not add their own hardware - they call on skilled friends or shops to do it for them. A sound card is not a printer, scanner, or camera (though we can talk about the ease of using those in Linux at another time)

and the most important argument:

4.) One computer with one type of hardware and one user is a laughably small basis to claim that Windows has more broad hardware support than Linux. Absolutely absurd. It may be able to be argued on some levels. This article is better suited as an anecdote of how Linux should continue to try to improve its automatic hardware recognition and Xandros' customer support quality.

I'm sure this article can be criticized from many more perspectives, and that my four can be refuted in some respects. However, that this passed as some sort of journalism makes me lose what little faith I have in the tech-writing community. If you want a decent end-user perspective on technology, read Walter Mossberg (sp?) in The Wall Street Journal. He's not perfect, but he's certainly better than this guy.

It's no record moment; it is (as-ever) a wake up call to the slashdot croud who perpetually fool themselves as to how good linux is. As this article highlights, failing to interact with such basic hardware as a sound card makes it unviable for mom & pop situations! How can you possibly expect people to have to try 9 different distros just for them to get the music working?

With that caveat in mind, I'll tell you that the "XYZ" software in the above was Xandros 2.0 Deluxe. But again, none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo. You can count that as seven major versions and four minors; or as nine distributions; but no matter how you count them, not one of those Linuxes fully worked.

"The authority is trying to recoup that money through state and federal grants and by eliminating some of the 30 part-time, temporary workers that reroute lost bags."

Maybe using this technology could lead to cheaper RFID tags.

Will there be interference?

Thing is, if the person who sent it to you *does* know about computers, they will know you are a tool.

Try and convince me that there have _never_ been exploits via html & pdf.

Here's the latest PDF one.

Did you know that Melissa and Goga were originally delivered via RTF ?

This looks interesting, although I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. I wouldn't dwell on the open source aspects of it too much. It's a tool, not a product. Extending it will just give them more reach into other systems, or like Mono let others do the porting work for them.

Microsoft has a released other tools for free to developers such as the Embedded Visual Tools for handhelds and phones. It was part of the larger effort to get a large software base for their CE platform when palm was the leader. It's so bug ridden they should release that to open source.

Then there was that browser they gave away for free, and Services For UNIX, event Dakimakura pillows in Japan.

Still it makes me wonder how for off this prediction is that says Microsoft will produce software for Linux in 2004. It's always fun to go back and see what people thought was going to happen.

HP and Novell are putting SUSE on it's desktops and laptops.

The EU fine is $613 Million.

$613 Million / $30 Billion = 0.024

So ... they fined Microsoft roughly 2% of one year's sales. This "proportionate" and "balanced" ruling was because the "near-monopoly" tried for several years to "shut competitors out of the market". (quotes are from the EU Commission)

This is how losing 2% of my gross income would impact me on a weekly basis.
(myGrossIncome * 0.02) / 52 = myWeeklyImpactIfFined

So what do you casually spend more than 2% of your gross income on? Lunch? State sales (or VAT) tax? Gasoline? Porn?

The fine is neither harsh nor effective. Anyone want to take a guess at how much the competitors have lost every year?

Just Click Here

Is Slashdot also blocked as referral?

Let's have a MS lawyer be in charge of all the anti-trust stuff. Yea, that makes perfect sense. Let's have the wolf make sure the hen house is safe too.

One solution would be for the U.S. to adopt a freedom of information policy more in line with the Nordic countries where public records are open by default, rather than the default of indefinite secrecy of UK and France. A lot of bad things vanish when exposed to sunlight.

"The key for customers is getting these patches down," Muglia says. "The biggest issue right now is that when we issue a patch, it can take them weeks to get it installed after they're done testing it. We want it done right away."

Yeah, right. The customer is not going to test first because Microsoft says it's ok?

But it probably won't defrag the harddrive. As for cleaning out the mal-ware, can anyone tell the difference between the OS and 3rd party stuff?

It was bad enough that the directive slid in as a "fast track". The directive needs to be cancelled, perhaps so does the "fast track" program itself seeing as the woman who initiated this directive did so despite conflict of interest.

BTW While y'all are fussing about SCO and other MBA monkey business, there is an attempt to change how U.S. laws are interpreted, which is much more harmful that just changing the laws themselves.

In the late 90's, SCO was promoting the Autozone/SCO relationship publically for a while. I remember this well, because it was one of my introductions to how effective a few Unix servers could be when connected to 2000 dumb terminals.

I remember that Autozone used to run a bunch of Unixware servers with dumb terminals at all of the stores. They had some other Un*xes to run various applications such as the Database, but I remember SCO touting Unixware as the system that integrated a bunch of disparate Unix and NT systems.

Here's an article about Autozone & SCO (Actually, it's an article about IBM and SCO cooperating on a new project, but Autozone was going to be one of the first new customers to use the project, or something).

Around 1999, Autozone switched to RedHat. Rumor was that the decision was apparently very contraversial within SCO, as it was a real sign of things to come--- people switching from expensive SCO systems to cheaper Linux.

Come back next week where Dean jokes will get you nothing. Who will they sue? Who has money?

A similar article can also be found at The Globe.

With the Linux community behind it, open-sourcing Java is going to mean a big leap for software development. Although they are worried about open source meaning zero revenue, this isn't necessarily the case.

Your tax money and mine paying for the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA's R&D. And of course, also reminding us all that it is a Federal offense to copy this stuff.

What does concern me is how MS is running after those who are obtaining the leaked code. Is an FBI group standing over every P2P system, and then providing user information to MS? Please! Or is the media running multiple reports on behalf of MS, about those receiving warnings, while in fact this entire affair is a media stunt?

After asking what Gartner has to say, the next question will be 'So who else has done this?'.

I still feel my question is valid. I may have made it personal (my job), but the question is no less valid. Why should (other than economics) an Indian programmer get a job held by an American programmer? Do the Indian programmers feel they are better programmers than their American counterparts? Do they feel they work harder? If the answer to those last two questions is yes, then how do they explain the fact that 50% of projects outsourced to India fail?

From an article:
"Half of this year's IT outsourcing projects will be tagged as losers by senior decision makers for not delivering on bottom-line promises, Gartner says. Outsourcing is prone to failure because of breakdowns in communications between outsourcing providers and their clients, the research firm adds."

Programming does not come down to simple matters of economics. If they work for 1/4 the cost of an American programmer, but you spend 4 times the amount of time making their code work, how are you better off?

Why not ask the question and see what the answer is instead of censoring the question in the first place?