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Linspire had filed to take the company public on April 20th, 2004 and hoped to raise $57,000,000. No doubt that the venture capitalists pushed the management to take an additional 35% with this Microsoft deal. It is hard to "fight the good fight" with that kind of money on the table; or make an IPO.

I just loved this gem from the link in the article "NBC will be able to send live feeds from Greece to the U.S. over all six links at once or use them for separate transmissions." Hmmm...six identical high-speed digital transmissions of Marion Jones tumbling in ignominy - yeeesh, wot a waste of bandwidth!

Now here is an article about the design of the media center and its redundant systems that is more in tune with my ./er persona

Did one. For everyone who hasn't googled, its here. Second to last question on that page.

Want to know what the best part is?

The original poster was right, and your uninformed bash at his comment caused the truth to be modded down. Maybe he doesn't like Microsoft, but even paranoid people get it right sometimes.

You may want to read this interesting article. In it, you'll find that this "shell bug" he's talking about is exactly what the mozilla bug was, and that it also affects word and MSN messenger.

Sorry to burst your bubble. And technically MS didn't fix it yet, they just disabled ADODB.Stream until they do.

Some microsoft products were affected also.

Yes.

Dell and others are shipping Nocoma XP & Win2000 systems, so you appear to be talking out of your ass.

Looking at just hardware guys, consider tier 2 OEMs like PCChips who accounted for 15 million motherboards/year that all shipped with linux. How's that compare to apple's paltry 5 million that you quoted.

But, don't forget about the user support costs, the system maintenance costs, and the downtime which results from running Windows, Outlook, et cetera, and the resulting infections.

All that dwarfs the price tag of the software, and most of it could be reduced if they used a mix of Linux and OpenBSD.

What's probably more important, by using the GNU development tools, they could easily port their software to dozens of architectures. Right now, MS can't maintain the Intel architecture for one OS and one office suite, while Debian can manage to keep three OSs and more than 8,000 programs built and installable on a dozen architectures. Think what MS could manage if they had up-to-date tools like the ones Debian uses!

I would challenge the notion that there is a distinct category of books that are self-published. To some extent the categories of publisher and self-publisher are anachronistic.

I've made the argument that there is no such thing as self-publishing in more detail elsewhere, but to summarize:

• Many independent publishers publish the work of a small number of writers.

• Many writers establish "publishing companies" to distribute their own work.

• And at this point, technologies like Lulu.com make publishing accessible to anyone and everyone.

The real difference, insomuch as there is a difference, is in the branding. O'Reilly, for example, has a brand that information seekers trust. So an O'Reilly book by an author you've never heard of is probably more appealing than a Lulu.com book by an author you've never heard of. But what if an author develops his own brand?

Along those lines, last week I found myself in the middle of a back-and-forth with a prominent tech journalist. His position was in essence that most of what is written is crap and that the editorial control exercised by publishers is essential. Fair enough. Most of what's written is crap, (although that doesn't seem to stop people from buying it when it's put out by major publishers).

But the dilemma you allude to, as I see it, is comparable to the dilemma presented by the emergence of the World Wide Web itself. "If anyone can put up anything on the Web," railed skeptics, "the whole thing is going to be useless. If you can't find the worthwhile information in the mountains of rotten information, what good will it be?"

Venerable institutions like the New York Times (justifiably) shuddered that individual sites--Matt Drudge's, for example--could compete with their own as sources for information. And yet, it has come to be. The Internet provides the means by which authors can develop their own brands. Matt Basham (the CISCO prof), for example, is in the process of developing his.

You've confused Java with JavaScript.

-C

Danny Ayers has some interesting discussion on his blog about winfs and rdf. There's also discussion of Jon Udell's Questions about Longhorn.

Well, this already happened to the Powermac G4 back in 1999, since it was considered as a "super computer".

More infos here.

I used to agree with you, then I read "How Microsoft Lost the API War". The thing that really struck me was that fundamentals components of .NET will be abandonned with Avalon . This is why I now think that open source .net is a masterstroke. MS is basically asking/forcing their developer base to adopt a now open sourced, platform neutral enviornment. In a few years, they're going to break the whole model and say that to play, you have to retrain and recode major portions of your work. At that point, it becomes more cost effective to stick with mature solutions that work, not play catchup to the latest and greatest. "Look, Shinny Things" is not a better business strategy than compatibility and reuse.

IIRC, Massachusetts was the last state holding out for an appeal of the Justice Department's settlement with Microsoft.

How has that settlement been working in practice?

There seems to be simmering small changes and perturbations as the agreement is reviewed, such as protocol licensing (MCPP).

Quoting from the Infoworld article:

Microsoft still enjoys a 90 percent market share in the browser and desktop operating system markets, said Stephen Houck, representing the so-called California group of states that sued Microsoft in the antitrust case. The licensing program's effect on competition is difficult to find, he said.

Kollar-Kotelly agreed. "At this point, it's difficult to measure its impact on the marketplace," she said.

The changes to the program are largely cosmetic, Ed Black, president and chief executive officer of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said after the hearing. The two-year extension of the licensing program is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship, he said.

If Judge Kollar-Kotelly finds the agreement not to be working effectively, then perhaps it's time for the court to review the agreement to see what changes might be made in order to effectively rectify the ongoing illegal monopoly and to restore a competitive marketplace.

My thought, too. If the kiosk app had to be running Windows and not be able to run anything else, I'd probably look into Windows XP Embedded.

From what little I've heard, XP Embedded would even make a pretty good desktop OS because it doesn't have as much gratuitous intertangling with browsers and media players as plain XP.

Nice limited functionality; you add only components that you want. Technically a good way to go for the general desktop and not just kiosks and POS terminals, but the business and marketing people in Redmond have other objectives...

Windows XP clearly has this restriction. I don't know how many people pay attention to it. heres one reference to the concern (scroll down a bit).

Microsoft says Web site violates copyright

Time based hardware button for application launch i.e. Double click

In terms of your readers, the figure to look at isn't gross wages, but _disposable income_ ( say after taxes, insurance, housing, transportation). Rising salaries may just indicate movement of jobs from lower cost areas like Oregon to higher cost areas like New York City.

Your analysis doesn't take into account the fact of the predatory, corporate sponsored immigration policy- visa programs like H-1b/L-1 with little purpose other than to reduce the disposable wages of IT workers. This article shows how this works for the economy as a whole. The H-1b/L-1 programs are still large compared to the overall pool of IT workers--and have a much larger impact than outsourcing at this point.

RJB

"Concerned enough about Wi-Fi security... given that WEP can be cracked with a large enough data capture"

It's called WPA, and it can be much more secure than WEP.

Just remember to be smart and NOT use a word that can be found in a dictionary for your passkey if you are not using an authentication server.. Random numbers help - doh.

Dude, if you are a technical worker in the West(tm), and aren't in the top 30%, you need to quit your job immediately and start looking for a new one... your're being royally screwed!

Based on this census info the median HOUSEHOLD income in the US is ~$42K, while this salary survey says that the average regular tech worker's individual income is ~$67K.

Seriously... especially when we have an HTML version of the survey HERE. =)

Kevin Railsback
IT Manager
InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

An EULA is totally nonenforcible under existing laws because when you buy the software product in a store it is the same as if you had bought anything else in the store, soap, a book or a concrete block. Under the Doctrine of First Sale you completely own that product and can do anything you want with that particular copy, except make more copies, unless the copyright holder allows you an exemption in writing to that clause of the copyright law. At the time of sale the copyright owner losses all distribution rights to that particular copy of the software and those distribution rights transfer to the purchaser. But only for that one individual copy.

Then you get home and open the box and they are trying to present you with additional rules and restrictions on how you can use something that you own. Under the doctrine of first sale anything you buy you own, nobody can put further restrictions on you after the sale.

Now, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act UCITA attempted to allow EULA to have valid standing under the law, but this effort has seen little success, only passing in a couple of minor states.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread (link), that speculation seems to be wrong, which is good. Source for that info is here.

I understand your reasoning, but according to this article (I found the link on Ace's Hardware) the dual core chips will be compatible with current motherboards and sockets with as little as a BIOS flash (to recognise the new CPUID I assume). The downside of this is that the two cores will SHARE the dual channel memory bus. But because the bus is so effiencent, each core will probably STILL get more bandwidth than most P4s. At worst it shouldn't be much worse than having two single channel Athlon64s (which also are often faster than the P4). I think this is FANTASTIC news. For one thing, this means you could put FOUR CORES in that dual opteron SFF PC that was revealed a short while ago.

Really, it only makes sense. A dual channel processor has 939 pins, a single channel has 754 pins. So while some are power, you're looking at about 190 pins for the second memory channel. So that would mean that to have two cores on one die with their own memory channels, you'd need 1120 pins or so. That's a LOT of pins.

Instead of that enginering nightmare (you'd probably need 7 layer mobos to support that), we get drop in replacements that meet the same thermal requirements. Just think. You're dual operton not cutting the mustard any more? Buy two processors, drop 'em in, flash the BIOS, and now you've got FOUR processors without a new mobo or anything. All you'd have to worry about then is software licenses (unless of course you don't use any software that requirs that, for example you're all open source).

So to answer the grandparent's question, I'd say buy now. That said, I'm not sure if socket 939 will get dual cores or if it's only for 940s. I assume 939 will get them too.

Speculation: I'd like to know if the dual channel memory controler is shared by the two cores (like some kind of cross-bar architecture thing like nVidia used to promote) or if each core got exclusive access to one of the two channels. My guess is the former.

More speculation: Will there be a socket 754 dual core? That'd be cool, and I don't think the performance would be too much of a problem memory wise, unless you were doing memory intensive tasks. For CPU bound tasks I think you'd be fine.

actually there is plenty of bandwidth left in hypertransport to pull it off. also each cpu gets its own bank of memory. the design is superior to all others for SMP. even AMD's man CPU man says that at infoworld

AMD's dual-core server processors will share a single memory controller, Weber said. This won't create a bottleneck because a server with two Opteron chips, and therefore two memory controllers, already has more than enough memory bandwidth required to run that system, he said.

"It's always a juggling act to add a little more processing and a little more memory. Right now, we have plenty of memory and I/O bandwidth, so we're adding processing," Weber said.

The dual-core chips will work with current socket technology in motherboards that are rated for the specifications of the dual-core chips, Weber said. A BIOS change will be required, but otherwise the chips will work in the same sockets as single-core Opterons, he said.

No you won't need a new motherboard. Look in this article at Inforworld.

"AMD's dual-core server processors will share a single memory controller, Weber said. This won't create a bottleneck because a server with two Opteron chips, and therefore two memory controllers, already has more than enough memory bandwidth required to run that system, he said."

Penty

As anyone who has looked into this issue can tell you, there is not in most cases a one-to-one correlation between an American losing their job, and the job going offshore.

For instance, Microsoft is shutting down a major facility in the US. They are also hiring in India. Will the Microsoft jobs lost in the US be counted as jobs lost to outsourcing? Probably not. That is why the new buzz words are "global sourcing" and "insourcing".

Also, how many jobs are being lost to "American" companys like Cognizant, who do not hire permanant US residents or citizens to work for them, only people on H-1B visas? 30% of Cognizant's 9K headcount work in the US (per the June 7th issue of Newsweek), and according to the Dept of Labor's LCA database the company has 2719 immigrants here on H1-B visas (you do the math).

This issue is not simply them bad us good. American IT workers are getting shut out of the IT labor market, even in our own country. This is not good for anyone. We are wasting our own intellectual capital, which we should be sharing with other countries so IT can be used to bridge cultural and economic divides. People should not have to pretend to be from another country as part of their job requirement. People should not be brought here on temporary visas and be paid less and worked harder than the Americans that work in the next cubicle.

This black and white thinking about this issue is pitting the workers on both sides against each other. The only people who win in that situation are the big guys making millions and millions of dollars to come up with these schemes. We (all IT workers worldwide) created these technologies, and historically we have openly shared and taught everyone so that the technology would thrive. That cooperative spirit needs to come through when thinking about this issue.

www.displacedtechies.com

The next step gets scary. EEG (electroencephalogram) measures brain activity. So far in early experiments, NASA has been able to get volunteers to move a cursor on the screen merely by thinking left or right, up or down. This goes beyond bio feedback, Wheeler was quick to add.

In an interview today with Tom Boger, Apple's Director of Power Mac Product Marketing, he says there will be no G5 Powerbooks or a G5 iMac before the end of the year. Perhaps the aluminum LCD monitors previously rumored will be revealed.

This is not a delayed lawsuit. This is the hearing on an appeal.

According to the article, the original infringment suit was filed in 2001. At that time, Blackberry was only beginning to see widespread use.

Sorry if I led anyone to actually believe that - it's a spoof, as described here.

But it's a damned good spoof, and has "gotten" a few people, not to mention the Register and infoworld, as mentioned in the linked article.

I hate to have to do this, but the percentage numbers are for different things. The revenue grew at 9.3% (to $11.8 billion), and the units grew at 24.1% (to 1.57 million boxen). These numbers are from InfoWorld. The article even said that it is "a clear move by users towards low-end servers and the Linux operating system"; that is a reasonable explanation how lots more boxes can ship with a smaller increase in cost.

FWIW, an article from SmartMoney.com from today uses an IDC report, and got similar (but not identical) numbers and it stated that the comparasons were Year-over-Year (total sales: $11.5, unit growth: 22.4%, Linux sales: $900 million, Linux $ growth: 56.9%, Linux unit growth: 46.4%).

Not in 2006, it won't.

viva la %2 marketshare! Don't buy a mac.

Sorry, but I couldn't resist. :) Where are those 2.4GHz PowerMac G5 boxes again? Remember in a year after PowerMac G5 launch there were going to be at 3GHz. Wait a minute, pesky IBM yield problems.

if you're using OS X to read this, and have a keyboard with volume up/down keys on it, this is for you:

press one of the volume buttons on your keyboard.

note the translucent display element indicating the current system volume - a gray, lozenge-shaped "window" to use the generic term for such things. notice that you can interact with the other interface elements behind it with the mouse/keyboard. note that, after a period of inactivity (after you let go of the volume adjustment key) the interface element indicating the current volume slowly fades to transparent.

ta. da.

if you're not, however, using OS X and/or have never seen this in the wild, this patent will pretty much assure you that the same thing won't show up on a windows box near you any time soon.

McBride is at a Loss for Words

Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.

This is probably a good thing. In fact, as it presently stands Darl could teach a thing or two about not running your mouth off unnecessarily to a certain other proprietary Unix company.

Actually... Scott McNealey would have to use the patents... .NET falls under most of the Java VM patents.

Somewhat true but, unfortunately, irrelevant.

Sun and Microsoft Settle Litigation
Posted by michael on Fri Apr 02, '04 11:20 AM
from the I-guess-we-can-all-just-get-along dept.
spurious cowherd writes "According to The Register Sun Microsystems & Microsoft have reached a settlement in their several lawsuits against each other. Sun gets $2B and both parties agree to share intellectual property." There's a press release to read as well.

Also Update: Sun, Microsoft settle suit in billion-dollar pact

What if Microsoft did commit someone to launch this worm (that reboots each computer) in order to force all of their user base to do an upgrade ?

Frankly, this rebooting is so anoying that no one will stand having his computer/server infected... of course with some little side effects !!

American Express also was hit as seen on Netcraft

I just feel like pointing out a recent article in Infoworld that suggests that offshoring is good and the related press release of a study by the ITAA.

China outsources alot of its technical censorship solutions to America. We're talking about Chinese rights, and there's profits to be had. Liberty and Justice for Us.

He's untouchable, he'll plead guilty as charged to being scum... but he's breaking no laws.

But not zero. And the commercial support is two-fold:

• development of the Apache code base,
• installation, customization and maintenance for users.

Sure, customers love high performing, reliable, more secure software such as Apache. And, if they have someone with some expertise with a few hours to spare once in a while, then they can maintain their own web sites cost effectively without ever cutting a check to anyone outside the company. And the effort required to support Apache may be lower than the competition in many situations. But it's still not zero. While the company can download and run Apache without ever contributing any code tot he project, code still had to be written and still needs to be maintained.

The Apache Foundation includes members of several commercial concerns. That commercial support of the open source project has probably helped immeasureably in making Apache better.

Also, for businesses and other users that would like to contract out Apache support there are vendors (eg, Covalent, IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, ...) that will provide it.

I wouldn't say that public ownership necessarily leads to "evil" companies, despite the strong correlation readily observed in today's (or any day's) business pages. But, shareholders care first about profit, and secondly about any other sticky issues like human rights, let alone basic human decency.

So I too worry that Google will be negatively impacted and can only hope that the (until now) strong leadership will continue to steer the course in that direction. After all, if the bottom line remains more black than red, shareholders are generally more inclined to be hands-off, allowing the company to continue thriving in its own special way. However, the minute there is any trouble, heads will roll, the gourmet chef will be replaced by a Micky D's franchise, and buildings e and pi will be renamed to something far more drably corporate.

Interestingly, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (the two founders) have I am sure a healthy desire for profit, but their own salaries have been celebrated by analysts as very fair, especially in comparison to the sick depravity of many in the S.V. (uh, does the name Larry Ellison ring a bell?). If those two were truly evil, they could have easily demanded an order of magnitude higher salary be paid to them instead. Of course, after the IPO they'll be billionnaires so the point is kinda moot.

Your respect for Apple, which I too have held in mostly high regard, will certainly be shaken by this: Cringely's Notes in Infoworld from a few weeks ago.

Also, in response to Ubergrendle: it is SAS that is privately owned (SAP is a German company I believe, and it is also publicly traded). SAS on the other hand, is run as The SAS Institute out of Cary, NC. I have used their software for many many years, it is bar-none the most well designed software product I've ever come across, expecially given its complexity. Also, everything I have heard about the company as a company is that it's an incredibly cool place to work. They are always in the top 10 of any employee survey of best (small to mid) companies to work.

czep

Then why did Sun push anti-AIX SCO FUD with their Wall Street Journal ad saying "Unfortunately, our friends in Blue have a problem with licensing contracts that could make things very expensive for anyone running AIX"?

Heck, a PDF of the ad is still up on Sun's web site here.

Wasn't Sun one of the SCO licensees? Maybe they're just reaping some karma here.

do adervisters really think this will increase their sales.

For the large, reponsible companies-- brands 80% of the population of your home state would recognize-- of course not. But for Fly-By-Night-Porn.com and other tiny web companies which would otherwise get zero business, even a minimal response rate from those getting the ad can be well worthwhile, even if the other 99.999% of the people seeing the ad swear up and down they "will NEVER do business with those #$%^ing @#$%^&*s so long as they exist". And they can always change names if the original company name gets tarnished.

Some additional reading.

Not to destroy the lovely mental image in this thread. Well, here is the story, Sun is working on Niagra and the Rock. The Rock would combine the single-threaded approach of the UltraSparc product line with the multithreaded architecture of the Niagra processor ... check out the complete atricle

I sort of laugh at Appledot these days. I mean a $1,299 eMachines Athlon 64 laptop with widescreen and Radeon 9600 video is ignored, but a laptop three times the cost that is not as feature rich or powerful not only has to be mentioned in rumor, and then again when it is announced. How about mentioning the new 4 way Opteron HP server just announced, or eMachines fine laptops? I'm XP, XP 64, Mandrake 64, and FreeBSD 64, and I can cluster three of them for the price of one of the Apples!! Heck, even Compaq has an Athlon 64 notebook for $1,299 in Best Buy now, but people are drooling over a small speed bump from Apple? I don't get it. Anyway, I think I'll buy a 7200 RPM Apricorn drive, swap out my 3000+ for an Athlon 64 3400+, and upgrade to a GB of memory and load levels faster in UT2004, Farcry, and Battlefield Vietnam. After those upgrades the cost will be closer to the Powerbook in cost except that I get to Ebay the parts I replace, and I get to enjoy 2.2GHz of 64 bit power! You see you can upgrade the Athlon 64 laptops yourself. Can you do that with a Mac, or a Dell for that matter? Nope.