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The DMCA is the US embodyment of the The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty (WCT).

This treaty, (probably) written by the RIAA/MPAA (literally) was approved by appointed trade representatives to WIPO. (see here)

When you see people marching as advocates of Fair Trade (like the opposition to FTAA) they are protesting neo-liberalization of trade by the WTO... so, dont like DMCA? dont want DMCA in *your* country? Join the effort to end Corporate Globalization through the WTO... the DMCA is a *result* of these thieves carving up our future.

Australians, Canadians, and Europeans: Find out who is your WIPO/WTO delegates are, and write a letter condemning neoliberalism (as embodied in the WCT(DMCA treaty)) and send copies to your PM/President and Federal Representative... ill be doing that now.

Only 2.4 Mbps? Compared to Wi-fi's 11 Mbps?

Link: here

[quote] At the recent Telecom Asia exhibition in Hong Kong, Samsung showed for the first time its M400 handset. Based on Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition, the device runs on CDMA 2000 1x EvDO (Evolution Data Only) networks, which are in commercial service in South Korea and offer data transmission at speeds of up to 2.4M bps. Features of the phone, which is based on an Intel Corp. XScale processor running at 400MHz, include a display capable of showing 65,000 colors, voice recognition and a text-to-speech engine, a TV tuner and GPS (Global Positioning System). [/quote]

Computerworld

Cnet

Internetnews

Infoworld

And, of course, Microsoft Watch.

People from TechDirt, who earn their living by creating corporate blogs, have a white paper on enterprise blogging available. And then there is this InfoWorld article.

Bluetooth is no substitite for a cellular network but as for the range try 100m range i.e. 300ft as a maximum with 10m 30ft as the lower bound.

It all depends on the class of the device.

See Blue tooth specs.

or
article discussing bluetooth range.

Its pretty handy when you want to ditch cables for laptop / pda to phone connections and for in car use with a BT car kit ot head set - you can upgrade you phone without dumping the car kit for a start! Can be a pain in the ass to set up with some devices though.

On the other hand, since those allowed access to the code probably had to sign the NDA-from-Hell, the schools, agencies, companies and individuals involved would probably be sued six ways from Sunday if they ever even though about touching competitor's code, specifically Linux. This risk, and a probably one based on past behaviour, could generate a rousing yawn similar to the original shared source announcement.

Or it is possible that Microsoft trying to line up more victims for the Sendo treatment.

Even InfoWorld, certainly no Apple shill, likes the iBook. See A grand well spent.

Cringely wrote about it a week ago, in his InfoWorld column. Still a rumor though.

Actually it is. InfoWorld: The Power of Voice.

Works pretty well too. I guess it's bad enough that they had to make a special menu item for it.

This might explain why Microsoft is going to buy Macromedia.

TTFN

There are a couple of good articles on this at InfoWorld. Try here and here.
Good quote:
THE GOOD NEWS is that Office 11 supports XML Schema. The bad news is that XML Schema has been described even by XML experts as "confusing," "impenetrable," "fuzzy," and "as user-friendly as a stick in the eye."

There are a couple of good articles on this at InfoWorld. Try here and here.
Good quote:
THE GOOD NEWS is that Office 11 supports XML Schema. The bad news is that XML Schema has been described even by XML experts as "confusing," "impenetrable," "fuzzy," and "as user-friendly as a stick in the eye."

Why are any of these old issues still being discussed? Were all of Microsoft's new hires this year astroturfers?

While slashdot talks about games on obsolete gamess consoles which no body gives a FLYING DOG SHIT ABOUT! Here are some REAL NEWS! From better news sources like google news and fark(!).

yet another linux migration story
More security holes in open sores software!

Nasa to look at snow flakes!

DRM to be used on water supplies

Jackasses are dumbasses

I am 371673R than j00!

Worse than that, there's a whole slew of "good" programs in ZoneAlarms view. Check this article on Infoworld.

I meant to link to this Infoworld story. Oh well, one day I'll learn how cut 'n paste works under X. ;)

Ed Foster covers this too, a bit. I think he mentioned it more than once in his column, The Gripe Line on InfoWorld. Here is the one I found: Cost of 'free' service. Poke back through the archives for more...

Ed Foster covers this too, a bit. I think he mentioned it more than once in his column, The Gripe Line on InfoWorld. Here is the one I found: Cost of 'free' service. Poke back through the archives for more...

...you'd have known all about Intuit's anti-consumer practices months ago:

Twist in Intuit's crippleware techniques doubles the cost of its tax-table service (4/27/01)

Intuit is up to its old tricks: Adding taxing burdens on its QuickBooks clients (3/17/00)

There is another column by Foster -- the #1 and only consumer IT columnist of whom I am aware -- on the practice of making QuickBooks users transmit invoices using Intuit's servers but you'll have to find it yourself.

...you'd have known all about Intuit's anti-consumer practices months ago:

Twist in Intuit's crippleware techniques doubles the cost of its tax-table service (4/27/01)

Intuit is up to its old tricks: Adding taxing burdens on its QuickBooks clients (3/17/00)

There is another column by Foster -- the #1 and only consumer IT columnist of whom I am aware -- on the practice of making QuickBooks users transmit invoices using Intuit's servers but you'll have to find it yourself.

...storing about 25 hours of programming on its hard drive...

Thus linking to a page about application development. I'm pretty sure that's not the programming in question. Automatic linking is generally a mistake.

After doing a little research, it seems that the study was indeed commissioned by MS...the more the reason to doubt its objectivity (see the second paragraph in this Infoworld story. Meanwhile, you might want to look at another study - probably no more objective (but no less either) since it was commissioned by IBM. Still, the numbers are interesting: TCO for Linux comes at about half that of Windows. Seems a Linux adminstrator can handle 4 times as more servers as an MSCE, which accounts for most of the difference (even though the Linux admin is paid more).

Google news found a few more stories (including the Slashdot "story"...) on this topic. Since MS paid for the study, but has not released it to the public, it might be worthwhile to read what little details are available.
Study Finds Windows Cheaper Than Linux
Windows costs less than Linux . A bit . Sometimes - MS study
Infoworld
and more

This is exactly why I feel that Linux is simply not ready to be used as the core NOS on a large network. It's all about managing NETWORKS, not servers. Server-centric operating systems are good for specialized tasks like web serving or applications, but for larger companies with multiple physical locations it just doesn't cut it.

Our company runs Netware as our core NOS. We have Linux servers set up as mrtg servers to monitor and trend network traffic (among other things) and soon will be used in Intranet and Firewall boxen. But if we were to replace Netware and go all Linux/*BSD our IT operating costs would go through the roof. This is because there is no way to easily administer network resources under Linux like you can with Netware (via NDS) or even Windows 2000 (via MADS)

This is exactly what i'm talking about. Network-centric Operating Systems are the present and if Linux want to gain acceptance in the enterprise they will need to abandon the "flat" server-centric model. A powerful, scalable, open-source Directory Service (and I don't mean LDAP) would be a great start ...

According to the analyst responsible for this study; "Linux requires more care and feeding, basically...".

Read more at InfoWorld.

How does Linux require more care & feeding? I don't understand, my experience has been the exact opposite. Whenever I patch a Linux box it continues to function properly, similiar maintainence on a W2K server (with a subsequent reboot) invariably leaves me with a new problem. BTW, patches to W2K servers are far more frequent and require longer download times than any Linux patches -- even when a new kernel is required Linux is still faster.

I think Giga has the right perspective here, if you don't know what you're doing of _course_ it's going to require more care & feeding. I'm eager to read this report, there is another MS sponsored study coming out 1Q2003 that should be equally interesting....

"For Microsoft to take the existing state of Bluetooth and embed it into XP would just be begging for trouble," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner, in Stamford, Conn. "Bluetooth interoperability is a complete disaster ... by and large, one Bluetooth device is not going to work with another Bluetooth device, because the specifications don't work. We need someone to take the lead with this thing and fix it."

Also, see Wi-Fi News: News for 8/1/2002:

Note also how casual the Bluetooth folk are about certifying interoperable: it's more like the regular meetings of Esperanto speakers arguing on the fine points of the language -- or perhaps Unitarians -- than, say, the Academie Français. That is, certification to Bluetooth is left up the individual company's testing procedures. This is unfortunate, as the Wi-Fi mark has been one of the single biggest factors in coalescing the 802.11b protocol into something that businesses and consumers can rely on. Bluetooth will sputter if interoperability certification doesn't become one of the requirements of the mark. No consumer will want to use Bluetooth if buying two or more identically marked devices doesn't offer complete intercompatibility.

but you might want to check the following link for just why MySQL sucks for non-toy apps

You're absolutely right.

Only complete idiots would ever use MySQL for anything serious.

Idiots like The U.S. Census Bureau, Slashdot, Yahoo, and Novell.

Might not be less secure but I think the difference is how opensource projects respond to and handle security issues compared to some proprietary software companies. The latter have to consider reactions from shareholders, etc when informing users of vulnerabilities in their products, they have the choice to stay quiet more often since the source isn't open. That isn't the case with opensource projects, the source is right there for everyone to poke and prod at.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/09/0 5/020905hnmssecure.xml

"I'm not proud," Valentine said, as he spoke to a crowd of developers here at the company's Windows .Net Server developer conference. "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers ... Our products just aren't engineered for security."

I'm not sure how much traffic they get these days, but the InfoWorld website is XML based. I believe it uses server-side XSLT transforms to turn XML into HTML.

Also, don't assume that just because the URLs don't have ".xml" in them that the site isn't using XML - it's often transparent, such as when using Apache Cocoon

And if you look towards the bottom of this Infoworld article, you notice that MS' next rev of Office is using "XSD", and they comment that "anything OASIS comes up with that's compatible with XSD will be fine in Office 11", i.e. make yourselves compatible with us or FOD.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/20/ 021120hndmca.xml?s=IDGNS

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/19/ 021119hnasicpurple.xml

Feast upon my linkage!

oh wait, foolish me the ibot invented by the segeway inventor dean kamen and made by Johnson and Johnson!!!

"[Allchin] later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."

Our products just aren't engineered for security.

Back to source, closed source will no longer enjoy the market it once had (why pay for work twice, thrice, etc.?) Right now new, profitable economic models are replacing the out-moded failing models in use by Microsoft. Despite this month's multi-million dollar campaign of ads and astroturfing, with people's attention now on security and TCO, the bottom would drop out of Microsoft's market if the code were accessible, even despite illegally leveraging their desktop monopoly.

Microsoft has just fallen too far behind in technology. Microsoft dropped the ball in regards to the Internet and has frittered away the time it needed to catch up. Arguments against using Macintosh or Linux usually center on retraining issues. However, heavy retraining occurred when migrating between Win3.11, WinNT, Win2000, and - for the chumps - WinXP. So if you have to retrain anyway, then why not go with something easier to both use and maintain like Macintosh OS X or Mandrake/Redhat?

When you consider the bizarre nature of the service pack EULAs, the migration to Macintosh or Linux should be the obvious choice

More info is available at Google News."

The Last Comdex?
Slashdot-18 minutes ago
linuxwrangler writes Key3Media Group Inc. which produces the Comdex trade show
may be unable to make it's debt payments and could declare bankruptcy. ...

Key3Media May File for Chapter 11-Seattle Post Intelligencer
Comdex organizer says it may file for bankruptcy-San Francisco Chronicle
Low-key Comdex to highlight gadgets-InfoWorld

At this stage Linux doesn't have anything even close to that. Of course it would be fun to hack a Tablet PC but not much productivity could be expected.

And here an article about Tablet PC software.

From article.

: Linux backers are working to strengthen the OS and bring it closer to competing with the proprietary versions of Unix that currently dominate the data center. Adding a clustered file system into Red Hat Linux is another step toward this larger goal.

1. Sites that rely on graphics for navigation are disadvantaged from the git go. For sites that people visit daily, it's probably no big deal since the graphics can be cached. For attracting new users it's far from optimal.

2. You should understand how people surf. People bail on sites that take forever and a day to load. Upsdell's site has a concise summary of some older research. It is still relevant. Here's another report on the Zona research. I think if you tested this yourself you would reach the conclusion that most flash animations are not worth waiting for. There are other sites out there, easy to find and easy to use. If your site depends on flash for basic funtionality you *will* lose visitors to your competitors.

Did you happen to catch the Flash Usability Challenge at Webword? Now I can't truthfully say that flash is completely worthless, but it hardly looks like the future of the web, does it?

BTW, I don't have flash installed at the moment. I went to your site (numbera.com) and saw no compelling reason to take your advice and install it.

Bye-ya

Well if this is indeed the case it still sound a bit like Adobe's newest PDF tools that allow a user to modify online pdf forms with out having to buy the over priced full version of Adobe's software.

Considering the licensing requirements of SP3 can put a compliant company on the wrong side of the law (1, 2) I would not consider it to be free (in any sense of the term). But considering the number of problems/issues that SP3 supposedly addresses (in the areas of "application compatibility, operating system reliability, security, and setup"), leaving your system as is (in a potentially vulnerable state) is also not something that people would feel free to do. Because of one law, they are in violation if they don't patch, and because of Microsoft's licensing, they're in violation of the law if they do patch.

So forcing users to make/keep their computers ineligible to be used legally seems to me to be a rather significant loss of functionality.

So I take it then that you think the FBI should go after Steve Ballmer for theft of internet services, too? He admits to doing it, and he encouraged his friends to steal some bandwidth too. (Check the last three paragraphs of article.)

The e-cache problem you referenced interests me, so I went looking for some links. Does this news article and this slashdot item with associated article reference that situation?

cnn article

infoworld article

Here's a link directly to a page w/in LANL and just for the heck of it a little something from google.

Standard Disclaimer + I work for RLX.

Please provide spacific examples of how my freedoms are being abridged and limited, and how Microsoft owns my computer(s). Please, be specific and don't rely on what you've "heard" here in Slashdot...

I guess that I am used to controlling the software on my computer. I pay for the computer, I own it. I pay for the software, I own it. I bought my music, I own it.

If you accept the EULA, you grant Microsoft the right to change the software on your computer. Please check with this InfoWorld article, not Slashdot. They can add DRM software, they can encrypt your own MP3's, and they can disable your favorite players for not being "secure". If they feel like it. When they feel like it.

It all makes good sense to them, and it will be good business for them. It just doesn't appeal to me.

Jus' a second thought.

Whoops, the correct link for Dan Briody should be: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/05/26/ 000526opwireless.xml

Since the site is slashdotted, here are further links about Serial ATA:

Cnet

SATA and ISCSI

Intel Dev Paper

Maxtor White Paper

It seems that they can emulate a pc-register in a risc architecture, but could they (easily) do it the other way around? Perhaps this is the real reason why they kept the abi the way it is: so they could easily port os x to whatever platform they like...

public signs that they are hurting

First off they've grown through acquisition rather than innovation. That business model pretty much guarantees that they'll drop like a stone after their zenith. Additionally, their income follows a few quarters behind the hardware manufacturers which have not yet bottomed out.

Since they turned an $18 bn loss in 1998, they've been found guilty of breaking federal law, specifically by violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the side, they admitted to and removed at least one backdoor in their relseased binaries, and without a code audit there is no way to confirm or deny the precense or absence of more. Even if a government or large enough consortium of corporations were to pay a code audit , the existing code meets neither privacy nor security requirements needed inside the U.S. Outside the U.S., specifically in Europe, privacy standards are much higher and there is not much chance that these problems will be addressed in the near future. These are the result of design flaws not typos. Patches can't fix this, only a rewrite can.

So there's more to say regarding DRM, software subscription, further leveraging the desktop monopoly+DRM, undocumented APIs, OEM tricks, and last but not least perpetual lock-in from the MS-Word and MS-Excel file formats + DRM. So far, Germany, China, Peru, Venezuela, India, Norway, Finland, and others have expressed doubts as to the wisdom of trying such experimental technology, which of what little has been examined has been found wanting.

Also their desktop markets are saturated. In the office suite, MS-Word 2.0 for windows and MS-Word 5 for Macintosh were good enough. Folks grudgingly went along with the newer versions as long as times were good. The Windows product line has come to near its end - Win2000 is good enough and few customer have deep enough pockets nor are there enough big chumps to go for License 6.0 that sneaks in with WinXP. Macintosh OS X gives you most of the commercial desktop applications that you will need, plus you have the added stability and ease of maintenance.

In the server room, any one that can read English is sticking with one of the *NIXes.

public signs that they are hurting

First off they've grown through acquisition rather than innovation. That business model pretty much guarantees that they'll drop like a stone after their zenith. Additionally, their income follows a few quarters behind the hardware manufacturers which have not yet bottomed out.

Since they turned an $18 bn loss in 1998, they've been found guilty of breaking federal law, specifically by violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. On the side, they admitted to and removed at least one backdoor in their relseased binaries, and without a code audit there is no way to confirm or deny the precense or absence of more. Even if a government or large enough consortium of corporations were to pay a code audit , the existing code meets neither privacy nor security requirements needed inside the U.S. Outside the U.S., specifically in Europe, privacy standards are much higher and there is not much chance that these problems will be addressed in the near future. These are the result of design flaws not typos. Patches can't fix this, only a rewrite can.

So there's more to say regarding DRM, software subscription, further leveraging the desktop monopoly+DRM, undocumented APIs, OEM tricks, and last but not least perpetual lock-in from the MS-Word and MS-Excel file formats + DRM. So far, Germany, China, Peru, Venezuela, India, Norway, Finland, and others have expressed doubts as to the wisdom of trying such experimental technology, which of what little has been examined has been found wanting.

Also their desktop markets are saturated. In the office suite, MS-Word 2.0 for windows and MS-Word 5 for Macintosh were good enough. Folks grudgingly went along with the newer versions as long as times were good. The Windows product line has come to near its end - Win2000 is good enough and few customer have deep enough pockets nor are there enough big chumps to go for License 6.0 that sneaks in with WinXP. Macintosh OS X gives you most of the commercial desktop applications that you will need, plus you have the added stability and ease of maintenance.

In the server room, any one that can read English is sticking with one of the *NIXes.