Slashdot Mirror

JoyToy writes ""AS PART OF its crusade to marginalize operating systems such as Windows, IBM is leaning toward giving the Standard Edition of its WebSphere application server to the open-source community." "

jjr writes "An article over at Infoworld say that a former exec of Novell is creating a open source(GPL) netware compatible OS. you can play with it over at www.timpanogas.com" The operating system is named MANOS, so I keep expecting to see a lot of hands involved.

jjr writes "An article over at Infoworld say that a former exec of Novell is creating a open source(GPL) netware compatible OS. you can play with it over at www.timpanogas.com" The operating system is named MANOS, so I keep expecting to see a lot of hands involved.

woggo writes "I just noticed in Infoworld that certain companies are firing their employees for using MP3s on office computers. That's right, firing, without notice or prior warning. 'Acceptable use,' indeed." What's the policy at your company?

woggo writes "I just noticed in Infoworld that certain companies are firing their employees for using MP3s on office computers. That's right, firing, without notice or prior warning. 'Acceptable use,' indeed." What's the policy at your company?

An anonymous reader writes "A current prototype of the Roentgen monitor offers a resolution of 200ppi (pixels per inch), with a total of 5.2 million full-color pixels, laid out in a 2,560 by 2,048 grid. Once the production version of the monitor is released, Greier said it will be able to display two full-sized 8.5-inch by 11-inch documents side by side. The article also notes that the monitor needs a 4 head Matrox graphics board to drive it." Thats ungodly. Sign me up.

Over at Infoworld, there is an article about Borland which announced at the Borland Developers' conference that JBuilder will be available next year for Mac OS X with support for the Apple's upcoming Aqua GUI. The article also mentions that Inprise/Borland is now commited to the developers community. Thoughts, anyone?

Over at Infoworld, there is an article about Borland which announced at the Borland Developers' conference that JBuilder will be available next year for Mac OS X with support for the Apple's upcoming Aqua GUI. The article also mentions that Inprise/Borland is now commited to the developers community. Thoughts, anyone?

brokeninside writes "Infoworld has an article about Germany's highest court on civil matters declaring that Microsoft can not prevent dealers from unbundling OEM software. This ruling stems from a lower court ruling in 1997 on a lawsuit against a German company for selling an OEM copy of Dos/WfWG sans hardware."

brokeninside writes "Infoworld has an article about Germany's highest court on civil matters declaring that Microsoft can not prevent dealers from unbundling OEM software. This ruling stems from a lower court ruling in 1997 on a lawsuit against a German company for selling an OEM copy of Dos/WfWG sans hardware."

VoidOfReality writes: "Check out this article on Infoworld about the open source release of Solaris 8. It seems Sun is running into some problems they forgot to think about when they initially announced the release." Hey, at least they're teaming up with Collab.Net to make it happen.

VoidOfReality writes: "Check out this article on Infoworld about the open source release of Solaris 8. It seems Sun is running into some problems they forgot to think about when they initially announced the release." Hey, at least they're teaming up with Collab.Net to make it happen.

bradlauster writes: "As Reported on InfoWorld.com: Intel will be announcing new mobile processors on Monday. One is claimed to run at 500 MHz and consume less than two watts! How's that compare to Transmeta's Crusoe ... and has anyone used one?" yomahz points to additional coverage at news.com. Isn't it nice what price/performance battles can do?

aliya writes: "Microsoft has announced Office and IE5.5 for Mac OS X in mid-2001. Given that OS X is based on BSD, what are the ramifications for those trying to get these apps on unix? Seems like a generic OS X-to-unix API translation would be a lot easier than Win32 API-to-unix. Not that I'm a big fan of the MS Office monopoly or the broken IE5 implementations, but it seems like this is going to have major ramifications for any application ported to Mac OS X." Of course, Microsoft promised products before which have mysteriously failed to appear, but still...interesting.

When you "purchase" software, what do you get? Increasingly, the answer is: nothing. Nothing tangible; no rights; and no resale value. This rant is spurred by Microsoft's changes to its distribution policy for all future editions of Windows. No longer will you receive a CD which is capable of installing the operating system with your new computer - Original Equipment Manufacturers are forbidden to ship you one, even though you just paid ~$100 for the software, and even though the change makes customers less than happy. Meanwhile, Adobe's chairman has the gall to tell us it's our own fault. I take a look at the future of software licensing.

MS's most recent abuses of its customers are just the latest in a series of increasing restrictions. OEM's are no longer permitted to include full-capability Windows disks with new machines - instead, what you'll get is either a disk image on your hard drive or an image on a "recovery CD". The "recovery CD" must be crippled so that it won't run on any hardware except that specific machine.

So what you bought is either some extra bits on your hard drive (sure hope you didn't want to use the full capacity of the drive; sure hope your disk doesn't fail) or a nearly-useless CD which is solely capable of restoring your PC to its original state - you'll have to backup and restore all of your data, reinstall all other software, re-change all settings you've customized, etc., if you ever use that CD. But you're a Microsoft customer [motto: "Your time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit to us"], so get used to it.

If you did something foolish, like swap in a new hard drive, or a new motherboard, well, I'm sorry, but you've lost any ability to restore your Microsoft operating system. And naturally, of course, you won't be able to copy it to another computer - even if you delete it from the first one. You can't sell it, you can't lend it, hell, you can barely use it yourself. Office 2000 with its forced registration procedure is much the same, and we're now getting submissions about this from people who didn't catch stories last year about it. Office 2000 binds itself to your system with the registration in exactly the same way as the "Recovery" CDs must be bound by the OEM to the system they ship.

The main effect of this will be to eliminate the concept of "used software". Software vendors like this; they can sell more retail copies if there's no aftermarket.

Generally, copyrighted works are governed by what is known as the "first sale" doctrine. This means that once the copyright owner has sold the item the first time, they lose all control over it - it can be resold without limitation. This matter originally came up when a book publisher was trying to prevent Macy's from selling books at a discount price. Essentially, the publisher (Scribner and Sons, still in business today) had a nice scheme going where it set "minimum" prices for its books. In fact, the scheme is practically identical to the scheme that music publishers have going today, and that software publishers like Microsoft are now moving to.

A brief quote from one of the cases:

The appellant is the owner of the copyright upon 'The Castaway,' obtained on the 18th day of May, 1904, in conformity to the copyright statutes of the United States. Printed immediately below the copyright notice, on the page in the book following the title page, is inserted the following notice:

The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "That sounds just like a shrinkwrap license on software! Or it sounds like what the giants of the music industry [Sony, Time-Warner, MCA, Polygram, Bertelsmann and EMI Music] do with their 'Minimum Advertised Price' policies, which has resulted in a class-action suit and an ongoing FTC investigation!" Am I right?

So how did the Court look at this particular issue?

What does the statute mean in granting 'the sole right of vending the same?' Was it intended to create a right which would permit the holder of the copyright to fasten, by notice [210 U.S. 339, 350] in a book or upon one of the articles mentioned within the statute, a restriction upon the subsequent alienation [transfer of property] of the subject-matter of copyright after the owner had parted with the title to one who had acquired full dominion over it and had given a satisfactory price for it? It is not denied that one who has sold a copyrighted article, without restriction, has parted with all right to control the sale of it. The purchaser of a book, once sold by authority of the owner of the copyright, may sell it again, although he could not publish a new edition of it.

Software publishers have this in mind. So they don't actually "sell" anything at all. If you make a contract to license something, the terms can be anything that a court doesn't regard as "unconscionable" - whatever the other party demands. So in fact copyright has almost nothing to do with the "sale" of commercial software products - companies could just as easily license to you software written by, say, the Federal Government (which would be in the public domain) They don't need copyright at all, since the contract alone is sufficient to bind your permitted activities, if the courts say a binding contract has been created.

The idea here is to get away from copyright, because copyright has all those nasty exceptions carved out by the legal system such as the "first sale" doctrine. But if you license something rather than sell it... and if you can cripple it with technology so that regardless of what the law says, the product can't be resold... ahhh, then you're in business!

Why have courts permitted software licensing to usurp copyright? Why do book-title-page-licenses not bind you but back-of-a-software-box-licenses do? Why doesn't the purchase of a copyrighted piece of software entitle you to do just about anything with it except sell copies, just like the purchase of a book does? It's a long story, but basically, I think it's because the first cases to hit the court system looked a lot like standard corporate contract disputes rather than mass-market sales. Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so. And now that people have caught on that this is a Bad Thing, we get laws like UCITA, designed to expressly legitimize these sorts of licenses. Remember that UCITA applies to software-hardware combinations as well, so your next PC might have a license agreement applying to the hardware.

But back to what started this rant. Microsoft's licensing. Microsoft has wanted for some years to move to a rental system, where not only do you not actually purchase anything for them, you get to pay for nothing every year. (In fact, they delayed the announcement of it so it wouldn't overlap with the anti-trust decision - might look bad to be simultaneously losing an anti-trust suit and announcing how you were going to get millions of people to rent software from you.) That way they can extract truly maximal profits from their operating system - raise the rents when it seems appropriate, cut sweetheart rental deals with some companies and viciously expensive ones with others, depending on whether or not you testified for the DOJ...

Microsoft has a couple of goals here, you see. Getting shrinkwrap licenses validated by the legal system allows them to control pricing in much the same manner as Scribner and Sons' attempt at book-wrap licensing. And building protective technological measures into their software, such as the OEM system-lock for the operating system or Office 2000's single-system registration procedure, allows them to get around the first sale doctrine - you could sell the item, copyright law says you can, but you can't sell it, because the software won't work for anyone else.

At a minimum, you could donate it to a charity or school when you're no longer using it and get a tax break. But that Windows 2000 Recovery CD or an already-registered Office 2000 CD are just coasters. Microsoft, of course, can cheerfully continue to donate software licenses and take tax write-offs for the full retail price of the software, a strategy which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes every year at a cost to them of approximately zero. And don't you dare to try to circumvent those controls in order to exercise your legal right to resell the software - that's a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I doubt you want to spend five years in prison.

In a non-monopoly marketplace, the fact these two products are worth a lot less to you than their predecessors would force a reduction in price. Instead, Microsoft raised the prices on both. Lawyers have considered the interplay of contract, copyright, and technological restrictions - here's a paper, here's another - but the time is long past for this issue to be considered by the public.

And that's why the threats of Adobe chairman Warnock are the last straw. Microsoft and all the other familiar names in commercial software have been increasing their restrictions for years. It doesn't have anything to do with piracy; we're

"...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."

regardless of what the fictitious figures of the Business Software Alliance say about copyright infringement. Listen to what Warnock is saying: if only we evil customers didn't make copies of software, Microsoft wouldn't force computer manufacturers to cripple the Windows installed on their machines. Yeah, right. Tell me another one, John.

But Warnock is absolutely right: it's a failure of the general population that is responsible for this licensing mess we're in. The failure is: insufficient regulation of the software industry.

If you buy a car, you are almost certainly protected by state "lemon laws". They were enacted to prevent the abuses that were extremely common, and so you acquired certain minimum rights in the purchase transaction which cannot be waived: if the car breaks down all the time, you can return it and get a refund plus your expenses paid. No matter what the sales contract says. Similarly there are restrictions on just how small the fine print can be, how egregious the interest rate can be, etc. The laws have had a salutory effect on auto sales - dealers are much less likely to try to cheat customers, and manufacturers have incentives to build better-quality cars. It is, in fact, a win-win situation - even though auto manufacturers screamed that laws like these would put them out of business in a week.

We haven't got anything of the sort with software purchases. And like Adobe's chairman just told us, the race to the bottom - who can have the most restrictive licensing, who can gouge the customer the most - is in full swing. It took a long time to get lemon laws enacted across the country, many years of abuses and horror stories, many years of opposition by the automobile manufacturers doing exactly what the software manufacturers are doing now: dumping buckets of cash into Congress. Are we going to learn from our experiences of the past and put some restraints on these abusive restrictions? Are we going to makes software sales into sales, and make software companies stand behind their products? We are, no doubt about it; abuses like these will only be stood for so long. The question is only this: How long will we stand for it?

What do you mean I don't own my software?
Adobe software is owned by Adobe. When you purchase software, you purchase a license to use the application. The use of the software must be in compliance with the End User License Agreement that is included with the software. Misuse of software is punishable by Federal Copyright Law.

-- from http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/main.html

We can fix that, Adobe.

When you "purchase" software, what do you get? Increasingly, the answer is: nothing. Nothing tangible; no rights; and no resale value. This rant is spurred by Microsoft's changes to its distribution policy for all future editions of Windows. No longer will you receive a CD which is capable of installing the operating system with your new computer - Original Equipment Manufacturers are forbidden to ship you one, even though you just paid ~$100 for the software, and even though the change makes customers less than happy. Meanwhile, Adobe's chairman has the gall to tell us it's our own fault. I take a look at the future of software licensing.

MS's most recent abuses of its customers are just the latest in a series of increasing restrictions. OEM's are no longer permitted to include full-capability Windows disks with new machines - instead, what you'll get is either a disk image on your hard drive or an image on a "recovery CD". The "recovery CD" must be crippled so that it won't run on any hardware except that specific machine.

So what you bought is either some extra bits on your hard drive (sure hope you didn't want to use the full capacity of the drive; sure hope your disk doesn't fail) or a nearly-useless CD which is solely capable of restoring your PC to its original state - you'll have to backup and restore all of your data, reinstall all other software, re-change all settings you've customized, etc., if you ever use that CD. But you're a Microsoft customer [motto: "Your time isn't worth a bucket of warm spit to us"], so get used to it.

If you did something foolish, like swap in a new hard drive, or a new motherboard, well, I'm sorry, but you've lost any ability to restore your Microsoft operating system. And naturally, of course, you won't be able to copy it to another computer - even if you delete it from the first one. You can't sell it, you can't lend it, hell, you can barely use it yourself. Office 2000 with its forced registration procedure is much the same, and we're now getting submissions about this from people who didn't catch stories last year about it. Office 2000 binds itself to your system with the registration in exactly the same way as the "Recovery" CDs must be bound by the OEM to the system they ship.

The main effect of this will be to eliminate the concept of "used software". Software vendors like this; they can sell more retail copies if there's no aftermarket.

Generally, copyrighted works are governed by what is known as the "first sale" doctrine. This means that once the copyright owner has sold the item the first time, they lose all control over it - it can be resold without limitation. This matter originally came up when a book publisher was trying to prevent Macy's from selling books at a discount price. Essentially, the publisher (Scribner and Sons, still in business today) had a nice scheme going where it set "minimum" prices for its books. In fact, the scheme is practically identical to the scheme that music publishers have going today, and that software publishers like Microsoft are now moving to.

A brief quote from one of the cases:

The appellant is the owner of the copyright upon 'The Castaway,' obtained on the 18th day of May, 1904, in conformity to the copyright statutes of the United States. Printed immediately below the copyright notice, on the page in the book following the title page, is inserted the following notice:

The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "That sounds just like a shrinkwrap license on software! Or it sounds like what the giants of the music industry [Sony, Time-Warner, MCA, Polygram, Bertelsmann and EMI Music] do with their 'Minimum Advertised Price' policies, which has resulted in a class-action suit and an ongoing FTC investigation!" Am I right?

So how did the Court look at this particular issue?

What does the statute mean in granting 'the sole right of vending the same?' Was it intended to create a right which would permit the holder of the copyright to fasten, by notice [210 U.S. 339, 350] in a book or upon one of the articles mentioned within the statute, a restriction upon the subsequent alienation [transfer of property] of the subject-matter of copyright after the owner had parted with the title to one who had acquired full dominion over it and had given a satisfactory price for it? It is not denied that one who has sold a copyrighted article, without restriction, has parted with all right to control the sale of it. The purchaser of a book, once sold by authority of the owner of the copyright, may sell it again, although he could not publish a new edition of it.

Software publishers have this in mind. So they don't actually "sell" anything at all. If you make a contract to license something, the terms can be anything that a court doesn't regard as "unconscionable" - whatever the other party demands. So in fact copyright has almost nothing to do with the "sale" of commercial software products - companies could just as easily license to you software written by, say, the Federal Government (which would be in the public domain) They don't need copyright at all, since the contract alone is sufficient to bind your permitted activities, if the courts say a binding contract has been created.

The idea here is to get away from copyright, because copyright has all those nasty exceptions carved out by the legal system such as the "first sale" doctrine. But if you license something rather than sell it... and if you can cripple it with technology so that regardless of what the law says, the product can't be resold... ahhh, then you're in business!

Why have courts permitted software licensing to usurp copyright? Why do book-title-page-licenses not bind you but back-of-a-software-box-licenses do? Why doesn't the purchase of a copyrighted piece of software entitle you to do just about anything with it except sell copies, just like the purchase of a book does? It's a long story, but basically, I think it's because the first cases to hit the court system looked a lot like standard corporate contract disputes rather than mass-market sales. Individuals have only started purchasing software at retail within the last ten years or so. And now that people have caught on that this is a Bad Thing, we get laws like UCITA, designed to expressly legitimize these sorts of licenses. Remember that UCITA applies to software-hardware combinations as well, so your next PC might have a license agreement applying to the hardware.

But back to what started this rant. Microsoft's licensing. Microsoft has wanted for some years to move to a rental system, where not only do you not actually purchase anything for them, you get to pay for nothing every year. (In fact, they delayed the announcement of it so it wouldn't overlap with the anti-trust decision - might look bad to be simultaneously losing an anti-trust suit and announcing how you were going to get millions of people to rent software from you.) That way they can extract truly maximal profits from their operating system - raise the rents when it seems appropriate, cut sweetheart rental deals with some companies and viciously expensive ones with others, depending on whether or not you testified for the DOJ...

Microsoft has a couple of goals here, you see. Getting shrinkwrap licenses validated by the legal system allows them to control pricing in much the same manner as Scribner and Sons' attempt at book-wrap licensing. And building protective technological measures into their software, such as the OEM system-lock for the operating system or Office 2000's single-system registration procedure, allows them to get around the first sale doctrine - you could sell the item, copyright law says you can, but you can't sell it, because the software won't work for anyone else.

At a minimum, you could donate it to a charity or school when you're no longer using it and get a tax break. But that Windows 2000 Recovery CD or an already-registered Office 2000 CD are just coasters. Microsoft, of course, can cheerfully continue to donate software licenses and take tax write-offs for the full retail price of the software, a strategy which saves them hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes every year at a cost to them of approximately zero. And don't you dare to try to circumvent those controls in order to exercise your legal right to resell the software - that's a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I doubt you want to spend five years in prison.

In a non-monopoly marketplace, the fact these two products are worth a lot less to you than their predecessors would force a reduction in price. Instead, Microsoft raised the prices on both. Lawyers have considered the interplay of contract, copyright, and technological restrictions - here's a paper, here's another - but the time is long past for this issue to be considered by the public.

And that's why the threats of Adobe chairman Warnock are the last straw. Microsoft and all the other familiar names in commercial software have been increasing their restrictions for years. It doesn't have anything to do with piracy; we're

"...going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. [We're] going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."

regardless of what the fictitious figures of the Business Software Alliance say about copyright infringement. Listen to what Warnock is saying: if only we evil customers didn't make copies of software, Microsoft wouldn't force computer manufacturers to cripple the Windows installed on their machines. Yeah, right. Tell me another one, John.

But Warnock is absolutely right: it's a failure of the general population that is responsible for this licensing mess we're in. The failure is: insufficient regulation of the software industry.

If you buy a car, you are almost certainly protected by state "lemon laws". They were enacted to prevent the abuses that were extremely common, and so you acquired certain minimum rights in the purchase transaction which cannot be waived: if the car breaks down all the time, you can return it and get a refund plus your expenses paid. No matter what the sales contract says. Similarly there are restrictions on just how small the fine print can be, how egregious the interest rate can be, etc. The laws have had a salutory effect on auto sales - dealers are much less likely to try to cheat customers, and manufacturers have incentives to build better-quality cars. It is, in fact, a win-win situation - even though auto manufacturers screamed that laws like these would put them out of business in a week.

We haven't got anything of the sort with software purchases. And like Adobe's chairman just told us, the race to the bottom - who can have the most restrictive licensing, who can gouge the customer the most - is in full swing. It took a long time to get lemon laws enacted across the country, many years of abuses and horror stories, many years of opposition by the automobile manufacturers doing exactly what the software manufacturers are doing now: dumping buckets of cash into Congress. Are we going to learn from our experiences of the past and put some restraints on these abusive restrictions? Are we going to makes software sales into sales, and make software companies stand behind their products? We are, no doubt about it; abuses like these will only be stood for so long. The question is only this: How long will we stand for it?

What do you mean I don't own my software?
Adobe software is owned by Adobe. When you purchase software, you purchase a license to use the application. The use of the software must be in compliance with the End User License Agreement that is included with the software. Misuse of software is punishable by Federal Copyright Law.

-- from http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/main.html

We can fix that, Adobe.

I just found this article at Info World which talks about IBM releasing a 64-way NUMA-Q server. The interesting part is that IBM promise to release a version of Linux optimized for NUMA servers. What do you think about it?

I just found this article at Info World which talks about IBM releasing a 64-way NUMA-Q server. The interesting part is that IBM promise to release a version of Linux optimized for NUMA servers. What do you think about it?

On Oct. 1, UCITA will become law in Maryland (Virginia passed a version of UCITA too, but delayed the effective date of the law until July 1, 2001). Infoworld has an article about Iowa considering "bomb-shelter" legislation to protect Iowans from UCITA-based laws passed in other states, and offers a few helpful hints for software purchasers. My suggestion is this: don't buy software from any UCITA-state company, or any national company whose licensing says you are bound by the laws of a UCITA-state. There's simply no reason to take risks like that.

dan the person writes: "Toshiba's latest 0.75 inch thick laptop features a watercooled processor. Watercooling is no longer just for hardcore overclockers. " Not many details along with this - if you know more, please post links below.

Keith Kris writes, "Looks like Virginia [its House of Representatives] has passed the UCITA, got it through unanimously, too. This needs to be stopped quickly. Many people don't even know what this act is. Spread the word." Microsoft, AOL and the Business Software Alliance are pushing this heavily. Virginians, you need to call your state senators immediately since they're still considering the bill. Tell them who you are, tell them you're a constituent, tell them you oppose passage of UCITA because it will destroy consumer rights.

smeng58 writes "InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe asks why, if Linus Torvalds is truly a believer in Open Source, Transmeta Corp. has seen fit to make Crusoe, or at least its VLIW "code morphing", proprietary. The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux. Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is. "

smeng58 writes "InfoWorld's Bob Metcalfe asks why, if Linus Torvalds is truly a believer in Open Source, Transmeta Corp. has seen fit to make Crusoe, or at least its VLIW "code morphing", proprietary. The column goes on to say that, since the processor will run Windows code, there must be some thing wrong with Linux. Sad when a computer pundit appears not understand what x86 code is. "

TNLNYC writes "Good article from InfoWorld about new prototypes of voice-driven PDAs."

pb writes "Infoworld reports that Intel is slashing prices on its mobile chips. Gee, this wouldn't have anything to do with Transmeta, would it?"

pb writes "Infoworld reports that Intel is slashing prices on its mobile chips. Gee, this wouldn't have anything to do with Transmeta, would it?"

brokeninside writes "Infoworld's 'Windows Manager' Columnist Bob Livingston named Linux his 1999 product of the year in his most recent column. I especially enjoyed his assertion that Microsoft was 'playing catchup' with Windows 2000. He said, '...Microsoft is catching up with Linux, not setting a higher standard.'"

Network Associates today issued a press release stating that it "has been granted a full license by the U.S. Government to export its market-leading PGP encryption software, ending a decades-old ban on the export of strong encryption products." InfoWorld says export to countries like Cuba and Iraq is still forbidden, and more details are coming Wednesday. But: finally!

copal7 wrote to us with the word from Infoworld that Compaq & Samsung are going to combine together to pump $500 million into the Alpha chipset. In addition to that investment, 1.5 billion dollars will be put into the chipset over the next decade. The companies are going to be targeting (Wait for it...) Linux, as one would have guessed.

quiller writes "Via is supposed to have a wearable PC that will take your voice, translate to seven different languages, and output the translated words through a speaker. Looks like something I want to look at while I'm there. " It will allegedly be showing at Lernout & Hauspie's booth, as it uses their translaton engine. The current specs have Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish in the box. I think I'd need one - I'd feel so Arthur Dent.

djKing wrote to us with the news that Sun will be releasing a "Java2-compliant JVM for Linux that brings the performance, functions, and Java HotSpot features of the latest Java specifications to the Linux community", which will be announced at the Java Developers' Conference. As well, IBM will be announcing the free general availability of a JSDK 1.18-compliant JVM, with performance better then that of Windows NT JVMs.

Zach Frey writes "Nicholas Petreley ^[?] 's latest column has an interesting side-by-side comparison of Linux installs vs. Windows installs. It's a data point in the "Linux is too hard to install!" war. The upshot? Current Linux distros installed in around 15 minutes and had no trouble autodetecting his hardware, Win98 took 40 minutes and failed to recognize his network cards. W2K took ... much longer. " The more interesting comments, IMHO, were the comments on Softway Systems, but the Linux install article is timely, in light of the CNN install nightmare story.Update: 09/30 10:27 by H :Check out an update from Nick posted in the comments regarding the version of Win2k.

jelwell writes "Borland has announced Linux support for Delphi and CBuilder. The tools are scheduled for a mid-2000 release. I wonder if they plan on integrating their products with any window managers/distributions?" Infoworld has the story - which also says, "To seed interest in the Java-on-Linux movement, Inprise this week will provide a free, downloadable preview of the JBuilder just-in-time compiler for Linux that supports many Java 2 Enterprise Edition specifications."

jelwell writes "Borland has announced Linux support for Delphi and CBuilder. The tools are scheduled for a mid-2000 release. I wonder if they plan on integrating their products with any window managers/distributions?" Infoworld has the story - which also says, "To seed interest in the Java-on-Linux movement, Inprise this week will provide a free, downloadable preview of the JBuilder just-in-time compiler for Linux that supports many Java 2 Enterprise Edition specifications."

JavaNPerl writes "This Infoworld article states that IBM is about to beta a transcoder that would translate content based on the client. This may get rid of some of the headaches in coding HTML and JavaScript for different clients one day and also make more content available for handhelds. " It's like the Holy Grail - keep seeing glimpes of potential systems, but this sounds like it may be the real thing.

According to an Article found on Infoworld, IEEE 1394 (a.k.a FireWire) appears to be dying, while Intel updating the USB specs to 2.0 with speed expected at 360-480MB per second range. Intel is not (and will not) supports the FireWire on their core logic chipset. I think it's a sad thing when a technology is dying.. What do you think about it folks?

According to an Article in InfoWorld, HP will release next week a new family of thin client PCs. Out of the 3 models that they will release, 2 of them will be with an embedded Linux core (the L & X models, and the G model with MS Windows CE) and they'll include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs as well as access to Windows applications. The X series also includes HP's ChaiVM embedded Java virtual machine, providing access to applications hosted on Unix and legacy servers. Oracle is also working on a thin client, so I think we will soon see some competition in the thin client area, where Linux will be getting much more attention, and more important - more Linux development. Who says competition is bad? :)

According to an Article in InfoWorld, HP will release next week a new family of thin client PCs. Out of the 3 models that they will release, 2 of them will be with an embedded Linux core (the L & X models, and the G model with MS Windows CE) and they'll include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs as well as access to Windows applications. The X series also includes HP's ChaiVM embedded Java virtual machine, providing access to applications hosted on Unix and legacy servers. Oracle is also working on a thin client, so I think we will soon see some competition in the thin client area, where Linux will be getting much more attention, and more important - more Linux development. Who says competition is bad? :)

Will in Seattle writes "A new InfoWorld story on a court annullment of the Sun injunction against Microsoft over Java. Arr, matey, the seas be choppy right now, first to port, than starboard, then port, then starboard. Abandon ship, all ye Java geeks!"

Dave Gudeman has submitted a feature on the subject of Invasion of Privacy. Specifically its talking about the recent govt plans to allow the govt permission to have backdoors into encryption applications, and in general just do all sorts of stuff that will make your blood boil (or maybe its just me because I'm halfway through Cryptonomicon:Neal you Rock) The following was written by Slashdot reader Dave Gudeman The US Government and Invasion of Privacy by Dave Gudeman Have you read about the recent US Justice Dept. proposal for Congress to give law enforcement permission to sneak into people's homes and businesses to sabotage their encryption programs? If not at take a look. I hope that you will be as frightened and infuriated as I was. And that you will also write your congress people to tell them how you feel about it. I think turning down this proposal is not enough. The justice deptartment people who proposed it and who presented it to Congress should be fired and should never be allowed to work in law enforcement again. Letting people like that work in law enforcement is like letting pedophiles work in nursery schools. It's criminally irresponsible.

Maybe you are not concerned about this because you never expect to come under investigation. I don't either. I've never engaged in any network activity that is even on the fringes of legality. But I probably have and will correspond with people who are possible investigation targets. And the proposed legislation allows the government to sneak into _my_ home and sabotage _my_ encryption programs if the person I'm corresponding with is too hard to get to.

But that's not really the main point. The main point is that there are people in the US government who are worried about the fact that Americans are learning how to better protect their privacy using computer technology. They want to make sure they (the government) always have the ability, with a court order of course, to find out what you are up to. Is this such a bad thing? Shouldn't the government have broad investigative powers to help fight crime?

Yes. I think they should. I'm not a privacy nut or an anarchist. I'm not generally opposed to law enforcement or to legal searches or wire taps. I'm even toward the conservative side on some issues. For example I think court decisions that prevent the prosecution from presenting evidence against dangerous criminals just because of the way it was obtained are heinous. But, I'm completely opposed to any laws that limit the right of people to seek privacy in any way they want.

Let me ask what you think of the following scenarios: A lock company invents a new non-pickable lock. If you lose the key, the only way to get through the door is by removing the lock. The federal justice department is concerned that drug dealers and child molesters will use these locks to prevent law enforcement from sneaking in and bugging their homes. So they get Congress to pass a law that if you use one of these new locks, you have to keep a key on file at your local police station, to be used by court order whenever the government needs to sneak into your home.

Not chilling enough? How about a law that requires you to keep video cameras constantly running in your home with a feed to the local police station. The police are only allowed to monitor the camera with a court order. Maybe they want to find out if you are smoking funny-looking cigarettes or if you are reading _The Anarchist's Cookbook_ (which, by the way, isn't very good) or if you are planning anti-abortion demonstrations.

Is that outrageous? But that is essentially what the justice department wants to do with encryption. They want to make sure that they can read anyone's email without that person's knowledge, by requiring all strong encryption to come with a special key that is kept in the possession of a law enforcement agency. Anything you tell someone else in private, encrypted email could be used against you in court. Don't tell Grandma "I had to spank Johnie today because he won't quit biting his little sister" because someone may arrest you for child abuse.

The government tells us this is to stop "drug dealers" and "child molesters". What they don't mention is that it can also be used against drug users (who may themselves be more victim than criminal), harmless collectors of erotica (you don't always know what you are getting until it is downloaded, and even if you delete it immediately, you will never be able to prove that), tax protesters (the US government has a long and sordid history of violating the civil rights of tax protesters), drug legalization advocates (who are often also drug users), second amendment advocates (who might own illegal stuff), and anyone else who is involved activities the government wants to stamp out.

You think it's OK for the government to go after those people with whatever means possible? Congratulations, you are a part of the majority. People in the solid majority don't have to worry too much about government persecution. Are you sure it will always be that way? Fifteen years ago, cigarette smokers never dreamed that one day they would be social pariahs, that their suppliers would be under massive attack and that they would be forced to constantly struggle with legal barriers to engage in their habit. Are you a drinker? You think that prohibition could never make a come-back in this country? Are you religious? You think the constitution will protect you from the growing anti-religious sentiment in this country? It didn't protect blacks in the early part of this century, and it doesn't protect gun owners and tax protesters today. Do you like to drive fast? Have you heard the growing noises about "road rage" and noticed that all these new police being funded by the federal government to "fight crime" are out in patrol cars with radar guns? You never know when the majority will suddenly turn into rabid haters of _you_ and the government will suddenly be after _you_.

Will in Seattle writes "Catch the LinuxWorld hype and try not to gripe about why you aren't there. San Jose, here I come! " Good article stating some of known stuff coming out-and that's some interesting stuff still coming out.

A reader wrote to say "According to InfoWorld , "The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) was voted on during a meeting in Denver of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL)...The vote count was 43 states in favor of the proposal, six against, two abstaining, and two not present." Looks like the end of any rights users *thought* they might have had. "

Wonko42 writes "The subject pretty much says it all; Red Hat is now selling its new E-Commerce server for $149.99. The server is packaged with several other programs, including the Netscape Roaming Module, Squid proxy, and Webalyzer web server log analyzer. And of course, it's built to run on Red Hat 6.0. "

Desperado wrote in to tell us that according to This InfoWeek Story, the 6.2 release of SuSE is scheduled for August and will have new/updated packages including IBM's ViaVoice, XF86 3.3.4 and VMware 1.0.

trims wrote to us with the an update on the AOL/Sun/Netscape triumvirate. Quite a lot of people have written that the the products are taking the name iPlanet, but it also appears that the name Netscape itself is being dropped from all but Navigator and Communicator. The article itself talks a bit about open source movement, and how the decision to drop the Netscape name was partly because Netscape had burned so many developers.

According to Infoworld, later this year, IBM will release an RS/6000 machine capable of running Linux, as well as AIX. While the article mostly discusses AIX, it says that IBM expects Linux to be very popular with ISPs and ASPs. Let's hope so. What's the architechture count up to now, anyways?

A reader sent us the latest installment in the Metcalfe and Peterely debate that started roughly one week ago with doubts about Linux from Metcalfe, and a response from Peterly. In this round, Metcalfe repents a bit, and also brings up the current hot topic: How the Linux community reacts to questions. Short, but interesting reading, and again raises the point: Read the Linux Advocacy How-To if you have any questions.

rafa writes "The IETF may soon launch an IPv6 promotion effort. The new IPv6 is an improvement over the current standard IPv4, that has a larger amount of addresses available, improves routing and has several other benefits. "

Aleatoric writes "In his response to Bob Metcalfe's article, Nick Petrely says he'll eat his column if Bob doesn't change his mind about Linux within two years. " Good column- describes the usual MS FUD tactics and why it wont' work this time.

Aleatoric writes "In his response to Bob Metcalfe's article, Nick Petrely says he'll eat his column if Bob doesn't change his mind about Linux within two years. " Good column- describes the usual MS FUD tactics and why it wont' work this time.