Slashdot Mirror

Hmmm... Sandia and several other US government labs seem to think different. Exactly *what* class of computations can a linux cluster not handle?

UC Irvine

University of Cyprus

Linux supercomputer for Los Alamos

AMD Tapped for Gov. Linux Clusters

Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

And more....

I wouldn't write off Windows as a commodity, and I certainly wouldn't assume that Windows doesn't add value.

I just spent a couple of weeks helping an acquaintance put together a massive graphics presentation [the final file was just shy of 100MB] for a professional conference, all done on Apple OSX. Guess what? OSX is an utter and complete piece of crap, at least as far as the end user experience is concerned. Apple was supposed to have the original drag-n-drop experience, but I doubt that current revs of OSX have one-tenth the drag-n-drop capability of recent Microsoft OSes. This deficiency applies even to flagship Apple partners and their ports to OSX, especially Adobe & Photoshop/Illustrator. And lest you flame me as a Microsoft fanboy, I learned to program about ten years ago on an old NeXT slab using Objective C, so I've got a heckuva sentimental attachment to the platform.

But back to my point: You people have used COM/DCOM & its drag-n-drop capabilities for so long that you've simply taken it for granted. While it may utterly suck as a programming paradigm [and, in all seriousness, when you get right down to it, what programming paradigm doesn't utterly suck?], it works for almost all end-users almost all of the time.

OSX is a joke. Linux on the desktop is such a sack of shit that it doesn't even qualify as a joke - it's more like a parody of a joke.

And you guys better watch out for .NET. Yeah, it utterly sucks [like all programming paradigms; see above], but it sucks A WHOLE HELLUVA LOT LESS than the competition it's about to blast right out of the water. Oh, and I'm a long time Novell CNI/CNE, so don't tell me how I don't want Ximian/Mono/SUSE to be a success.

PS: If you think Java doesn't utterly suck, try to JAVAC the following code:

long theArrayLength = GREAT_BIG_HONKIN_LONG_INT;
double [] theArray = new double[theArrayLength];

for(long i = 0; i < theArray.length; i++)
{
theArray[i] = blahBlahBlah(i);
}

...as reported by internet.com. Interestingly it seems that even the previous time was not really the first?

"For the second time in less than two years, a federal judge has ordered the Interior Department to disconnect from the Internet in order to protect $1 billion in American Indian money managed by the agency.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said Interior's refusal to cooperate with a court-appointed master who wanted to test the security of Interior's systems, prompted the decision. The government claimed it did not cooperate with Security Assurance Group of Annapolis, Md., because they could not agree on the "rules of engagement."

The painted ads don't mention IBM or its EServer family, and are part of a marketing push developed by New York advertising company Ogilvy and Mather, a unit of WPP Group. IBM can't shift the blame on the agency, however; responsibility for the infraction lies with "the source," [director of public affairs for the city's Department of Public Works, Alex] Mamak says.

Canada Leads US in Broadband Usage

I've never had problems with Mozilla Firebird - ever.

Are you sure you're not just venting an opinion the targeted audience would like to hear?

I've been using it since November last, every day nearly, at work and home.

Have you encountered some java applets yet?

Oh, wait: I meant to get this link in there, but hit submit too soon:

MiMail Virus Attacking Anti-Spam Groups

That's right -- the last time around, these guys were attacking anti-spam projects -- basically members of our community. I'm willing to believe Bruce Perens' hypothesis that this is just more of the same, except indirectly.

The above post is overrated. If they knew anything about fax.com, they'd know that fax.com recently (within the past two years) wardialed the university of washington medical center, tying up their phone lines.

I'd call tying up a hospital's phone lines to be VERY life threatening.

I used to volunteer there. If you tied up the phone lines, there was no way a nurse was going to be able to page a doctor for an urgent patient situation. Again, very life threatening.

Parent modded funny, but there is definitely truth to that, especially when dealing with tech products. According to this article, when buying things online, men seem to do a better job of comparison shopping.

Some Proof

These are statistics from 2003, and it's only to be expected that as the game market grows it will take in a demographic closer to that of the whole population.

Google was rumored to be planning an unusual public auction for their IPO. It's not a new idea and may result in fairer pricing for IPO shares.

If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet....Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote.

More likely, the data will be skewed due to the fact that only 2 in 5 households have internet access and most of that is concentrated in higher-income, white and Asian households. If you want go with more current estimates of around 149 million of the 291 million people that live in the U.S. - 51 percent of the population - have Internet access. According to a fairly recent Pew Study as much as 24% of the U.S. population is completely disconnected from the Internet - and this research suggests that's the way they want it.

Now, if you contrast this with the fact that in the 1990's the number of people without a landline telephone was around 5%, you start to see that there is a methodological problem with both approaches that gets worse as the number of people without landline phones climbs. Even if you want to argue that Internet use is probably strongly correlated to voting - due to the fact that the Census says this about people that vote:

The characteristics of people who are most likely to go to the polls are a reflection of both the racial/ethnic composition of the citizen population and the attributes of people with the biggest stakes in society: older individuals, homeowners, married couples, and people with more schooling, higher incomes, and good jobs.

If you factor that Internet use skews to younger demographics such as college students that do not necessarily fit the profile of voters, you still can get the sense that this isn't a good research methodology that can be extrapolated to the general U.S. population.

Of course, there are problems even with the data I cite here, just look at the number of refused answers for the Pew Study to see one example. At present, pretty much any survey company worth its salt such as MRI, Simmons and others do at home personal interviews. The approach of the Census also provides a notable example and which is why I relied so much on their data here.

Good data simply requires more effort - and political pollsters are either going to have to live with some ambiguity or they are going to have to spend more money and time to get good results.

If you really want to get polling information about political stuff, use the internet....Now, of course the results will be skewed because only people who are informed and interested in the issue at hand will vote.

More likely, the data will be skewed due to the fact that only 2 in 5 households have internet access and most of that is concentrated in higher-income, white and Asian households. If you want go with more current estimates of around 149 million of the 291 million people that live in the U.S. - 51 percent of the population - have Internet access. According to a fairly recent Pew Study as much as 24% of the U.S. population is completely disconnected from the Internet - and this research suggests that's the way they want it.

Now, if you contrast this with the fact that in the 1990's the number of people without a landline telephone was around 5%, you start to see that there is a methodological problem with both approaches that gets worse as the number of people without landline phones climbs. Even if you want to argue that Internet use is probably strongly correlated to voting - due to the fact that the Census says this about people that vote:

The characteristics of people who are most likely to go to the polls are a reflection of both the racial/ethnic composition of the citizen population and the attributes of people with the biggest stakes in society: older individuals, homeowners, married couples, and people with more schooling, higher incomes, and good jobs.

If you factor that Internet use skews to younger demographics such as college students that do not necessarily fit the profile of voters, you still can get the sense that this isn't a good research methodology that can be extrapolated to the general U.S. population.

Of course, there are problems even with the data I cite here, just look at the number of refused answers for the Pew Study to see one example. At present, pretty much any survey company worth its salt such as MRI, Simmons and others do at home personal interviews. The approach of the Census also provides a notable example and which is why I relied so much on their data here.

Good data simply requires more effort - and political pollsters are either going to have to live with some ambiguity or they are going to have to spend more money and time to get good results.

Linux DOES probably have more machines on its side. However, that's not necessarily relevant. Linux's overwhelming number of machines is not because they have a gadzillion desktop users. They run a lot of servers. When it comes to Linux desktop usage, I've yet to see a figure that puts it significantly ahead of Apple in desktop use. Feel free to show me some reliable figures to prove me wrong on this.

OK. Linux at 1.7% versus Mac at 3.1%.

Keep in mind that unlike OS X, Linux can be run on old machines, new machines and everything in between (including old Macs). In addition, every Mac and Windows machine out there is a potential Linux machine. With the easy availability of low-to-no cost Linux distributions, it is nearly impossible to actually estimate the real number of desktops out there. Every estimate I have ever seen has always had the caveat that the real number is going to be a lot higher.

People running servers don't need fancy MP3 playing software. The majority of deployed linux boxes are servers. So long as tenant 2 holds, the majority of linux boxes wouldn't run iTunes.

Umm, we don't need QT for playing MP3's, we need it to play those trailers and movies that so many people thoughtlessly throw up on the web in that closed format. Luckily as with most things we have circumvented vendor idiocy using other means, but Apple's refusal still grates.

Apple supports iTunes with Windows for some good reasons. Firstly, it's the same reason that BeOS started supporting x86 machines. They like money, money is good, and therefore they try and get more of it. The huge spike in iTMS sales suggests this was a good move. Secondly, Quicktime was already out for Windows. Since iTunes relies on Quicktime, their sound code should be trivially portable.

And how much money does Apple make with their free Windows Quicktime viewer again? You do recall that is what we are talking about here?

Apple has kicked back a lot of stuff to the open source community. Apple really doesn't owe Linux in particular anything. Apple owes most of itself to BSDs.

Ok, then, why isn't there a QT player for FreeBSD?

If you don't want an Apple computer, that's your call. Many people would argue it's your loss though.

And many people wouldn't. Me, for example.

What gets me about this whole debate is the hypocrisy from the Mac community. Whenever there is a Windows only app that comes out, there is a cry in the community about being unfairly locked out, but when Apple does the same thing to other platforms, they are defended tooth and nail by those same people.

However, Winamp has pretty much always been free as in beer. Even when they had registration, there was a distinction between the Lite version and the Pro version. At one point I think they were even planning to do "adware" though I'm not sure if a release with that was ever done.

Over here is a complete archive of Winamp releases, except the none of the frelling links work. But you can see the release history at least. At a certain point, Nullsoft was bought by AOL and thus didn't need to do the shareware/registration thing anymore.

As for Open Source, Nullsoft has released a lot of OpenSource stuff, pretty much all for Windows. The most useful being their installer program, I've seen a lot of freeware packages use NSIS. Here's all the programs Nullsoft has released recently. I've always liked Nullsoft's naming approach...

(Historical note: One of the most popular plugins for Winamp has been Geiss, developed by Mr. Ryan Geiss. He originally wrote it independently. Then he got a job with Creative Labs working on Oozic, Creative's own idea for a media player with nifty visuals. Oozic started life as Lava but had to change names, probably for trademark reasons. Sadly, Creative Tech turned asswipe with Oozic, declaring it only available for those who bought their hardware and had it on the driver CD. Anyways, Mr. Geiss left Creative to go work for Nullsoft! Where he developed some more nifty visualization tools such as Milkdrop and Geiss II.)

(BONUS Historical note: Before Winamp, before multi-media players with visualization plugins, there was Cthugha by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt. Cthugha started life as a DOS freeware program that did pretty VGA animations in synch with music from an audio CD. Eventually a version was developed for Windows 95, and 3D support was even added providing you used a 3DFX card. Sadly the project has languished for years now but not before Kevin released source and a number of folks ported Cthugha to MacOS, Linux, Java and yes, even a Winamp plugin!)

"If it's anything (like the August attack), then it would probably be someone from the Linux community, but there's no way of knowing that for 100 percent sure," [Blake Stowell] said.

Stowell said there's no way, right now, of knowing who the culprit is behind today's attack and have not found the person behind the first two attacks. Given the method of DoS attacks, which flood the TCP/IP stack with useless traffic from a remote computer, it's going to be difficult to find the source of the attack.

"If it's anything (like the August attack), then it would probably be someone from the Linux community, but there's no way of knowing that for 100 percent sure," he said.

this articles a good read so take the time to go through it as it summarises innovation from the early internet years to date.

innovation. The trick is finding that one crazy idea. The problem with crazy ideas, though, is that for every one good crazy idea, there's a thousand bad crazy ideas

the eternal quest for an idea. you better start with a good idea. if you don't, no matter how hard you try it wont pan out.

the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn't want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, ... Only smart people could use the Internet ...so we needed to keep it hard to use

what other examples can you think of right now?... only smart people can use [insert you own example]

Mosaic started with 12 users in February 1993. It had 1,000 users within three or four weeks. About 10,000 users by spring. It was up to 1 million by early 1994

Posters who question why Andreessen has such prominence should reflect on this. No Mosaic (mozilla), no Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE Based on NCSA Mosaic code base licensed from Spyglass), no World Wide Web in the early to mid 90's. No doubt someone else may have invented the browser but how much longer would it have taken?

At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit ... Everybody wants to play with you ....within a year ... fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition

Larry, Sergi do you feel the hot breath of the MS juggernaut as you approach your IPO. Will google will be a repeat of Netscape/MS tussle?

Oracle database was a huge success ... Larry's spent the last 25 years trying to come up with the next product

it sure helps when the government (CIA) is your preferred backer. Why does oracle feel the need to keep trying to re-innovate or create the next best idea?

innovation comes from companies that are 2 years old, populated by 19-year-olds ... preposterous that Marc should think that innovation is .. the province of little entrepreneurial companies.

In fact it's both. The technical revolution was spurred on the back of the transistor. This was the combined effort of Bardeen, Brattain and shockley at Bell Labs - no small comany there ... but look at Intel, though a big company now, it was started with the (not so young) Noyce, Moore and Grove. What about the Linux kernel, third person shooters and that other search engine, Yahoo?

The first employs the "Berkeley Packet Filter" (BPF) firewall but SCO ever held an ownership interest in the original BPF implementation

Moglen said a pattern matching search shows SCO what it thought was an example of copying

but the "C code" shown in the slides was first incorporated in Unix Version 3

SCO used pattern matching to associate code as its own

It has therefore published its supposed trade secrets and copy-righted material

distribute under GPL (define)

He also sees merit in IBM's counterclaim against SCO raises with respect to IBM's contributions to the Linux kernel.

anyone who violates GPL automatically loses

Etc., etc. Wasn't Slashdot's point to link original sources so as to spare us such tripe? Editors: edit!

I really at this point just wish SCO would put up or shut up.

Congratulations! You get a present.

I miffed some of my links in the parent post:

Here is the reference to the ex-SDSC scientist.

Here is the link showing that the Opteron cluster is using Linux Networx.

Finally in the interest of full disclosure and to pre-empt the anti-Mac zealots, I should mention that the $4.2 million for the G5 machines is probably the education list price, because when you go to Apple Store, putting 2GB of RAM into 1100 2x2Ghz G5's will cost you $4.4 million (+ a little more for having some spare machines).

Not among those seeking a Microsoft desktop alternative are customers in the United States, Schwartz said. "I will be blunt in saying North America has the least sensitivity to price of any nation on Earth," he said.

Company Executive Vice President Jonathan Schwartz Thursday said the
appetite outside U.S. for an alternative to Microsoft is "voracious".

Yahoo used to get their maps from Map Quest. Since 2002 they've been providing their own service. Both companies use data from Navigation Technologies Corp.

Here's an article on Yahoo's shift from MapQuest:

Yahoo! to MapQuest: Get Lost

...before these two signed on. Well actually Skypes is not anyhting really impressive VoIP anyways. and SIPPhone's main attractor is it is an all in one SIP device as opposed to a router that a phone gets hooked to, and that they are not operating with month to month fee's- buy the hardware and your done. Of course though they are not a telco or any for of carrier but more a directory service (411) and hardware retailer. Maybe he fully expects that he can make enough profit from each sale then bugger out at the right moment when having some minimum form of month to month is needed. In the meantime there are a number of VoIP systems and companies that have been around for a while now. Vonage, Lightspeed Communications and others. They have been in the markets now for at least a year, and have been picking up speed steadily. Enough so that in a number of states the PUC's are itching to regulate and apply regulatory fees to them. Luckily the Fed courts have so far seen the light and said no. Oh and yes they are standards based, in fact they use a number of standards including SIP just like the SIPPhones...in fact the SIPPhones should be able to be used with Vonage or a similar company, of course getting one of those comapnies to support it might be a different story. You would have to pay me to use a standard phone companies services for telephony anymore.

Steve Jobs is really amazing. He will be the first person to successfully establish a non-x86 processor as a viable alternative to the x86 processors. The entire ill-fated consortium called the Advanced Computing Environment (which promoted MIPS R2000), backed by professors from Stanford University, could not do it. The gang (which promoted the PowerPC) of IBM, Motorola, and Apple (under the old CEO) could not do it.

Now, here comes Steve Jobs. Apple, under his leadership, manages to do it. How does he do it? What's his secret? You can be sure that ECC memory for the G5 is on its way.

... from the desk of the reporter

No-floppy computers? Sorry, he did not. IBM sold crippled floppy-less PC's at the beginning. This is not a good idea: it is bad one that few copy. It is not a good thing to sell something without a useful feature. That's why most PC's have floppies (along with the DVD or CDRW burner).

Computers without floppy drives are not crippled, unless you need to use a floppy to interact with an old computer that can't use something better for some reason. For example, it might be a convenient way to transport small files (word processing documents, for example) to/from a computer that doesn't have Internet access, and I'll need to use floppies the next time I upgrade the OS on my 486. If you need these features, you can buy a floppy drive. But there's no reason for every computer in my house to have one.

USB? He did not bring us this. It would all over the place before the iMac.

USB was on motherboards; there were almost no USB peripherals. The first USB printer to hit the market was made by Epson, and it had translucent blue plastic to match the iMac.

These unreadable icons will die a quick death. Thankfully, few are following the lead. Look for Apple to ditch it when the paradigm of "make icons readable" returns.

I'm with you on that.

We could also mention an old Job's favorite: "eject the disk with a bent paperclip in a hole. It is so much better than an eject button". No one copied this.

Sun did, I believe.

Eventually, Jobs had to follow the leaders: there are now eject buttons on Macs.

There are now CD eject buttons on Mac keyboards. Previously, there had always been eject buttons on Mac CD-ROM drives, as well as other Mac removable media drives such as Zip drives, external floppy drives, etc. Newer Macs do not have accessible eject buttons on them, relying on the keyboard button instead. What does this have to do with your point?

It should be noted that nearly all removable media drives have a paperclip hole, except PC floppy drives which have a manual eject button. Try to find some that don't.

Actually, the one innovation you did name that finds favor outside of Apple's niche that Jobs was involved with was Firewire, which he did.... alongside Sony.

Then why didn't Sony win the Emmy?

Article Here
More Here

This is great, but let's not forget that there is always CAPPS II, which is just the TIA in disguise!

RIAA, Verizon Head Back To Court Over Subpoenas

Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, September 16th, 2003 @ 01:40AM
from the continuing-the-battle dept.
While Verizon failed in its original bid to protect the privacy of one of their users from random RIAA subpoenas not backed up by a lawsuit, the case is still going on. In fact, Verizon has expanded the case. While, originally, they argued that they were exempt from the DMCA subpoenas since they weren't storying anything on their own servers - but that the file sharing was being done on individuals' home computers. Now, however, they're challenging the very constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena power, which makes it possible for anyone to send a subpoena just by filling out a form and claiming that a copyright violation has occurred. There's simply no oversight, and Verizon says they wonder how this can be constitutional. While (obviously), Verizon is doing this out of self-interest (not to be bombarded with subpoenas - and possibly because they know that file sharing is a prime motivator for getting folks to sign up for DSL), the claims do make sense. Already there have been stories of porn sites using the subpoena power to hit up ISPs to get records on everyone who visits their site. Of course, we have a long way to go before a final decision. The latest set of arguments will go before the Court of Appeals, meaning we still have to wait a while before it is (inevitably) appealed again to the Supreme Court. It may be years before a decision is reached. In the meantime, all we can hope for is that some politicians come to their sense and pre-emptively change the law. Update: Meanwhile, the NY Times is reporting that SBC remains the loan holdout refusing to cough up names to the RIAA, claiming that they feel obligated to protect their subscribers' privacy. The RIAA says the case is all about how SBC profits from file sharing - but I'm not sure why that would matter. After all, one assumes the RIAA is filing these lawsuits in the first place because they're hoping (wishfully, it seems) to profit as well.

RIAA, Verizon Head Back To Court Over Subpoenas

Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, September 16th, 2003 @ 01:40AM
from the continuing-the-battle dept.
While Verizon failed in its original bid to protect the privacy of one of their users from random RIAA subpoenas not backed up by a lawsuit, the case is still going on. In fact, Verizon has expanded the case. While, originally, they argued that they were exempt from the DMCA subpoenas since they weren't storying anything on their own servers - but that the file sharing was being done on individuals' home computers. Now, however, they're challenging the very constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena power, which makes it possible for anyone to send a subpoena just by filling out a form and claiming that a copyright violation has occurred. There's simply no oversight, and Verizon says they wonder how this can be constitutional. While (obviously), Verizon is doing this out of self-interest (not to be bombarded with subpoenas - and possibly because they know that file sharing is a prime motivator for getting folks to sign up for DSL), the claims do make sense. Already there have been stories of porn sites using the subpoena power to hit up ISPs to get records on everyone who visits their site. Of course, we have a long way to go before a final decision. The latest set of arguments will go before the Court of Appeals, meaning we still have to wait a while before it is (inevitably) appealed again to the Supreme Court. It may be years before a decision is reached. In the meantime, all we can hope for is that some politicians come to their sense and pre-emptively change the law. Update: Meanwhile, the NY Times is reporting that SBC remains the loan holdout refusing to cough up names to the RIAA, claiming that they feel obligated to protect their subscribers' privacy. The RIAA says the case is all about how SBC profits from file sharing - but I'm not sure why that would matter. After all, one assumes the RIAA is filing these lawsuits in the first place because they're hoping (wishfully, it seems) to profit as well.

From the same company that not all to long ago tried a scam to steal away domain names from their initial registrars, and is now being sued class-action style and being investigated by the FTC?

Could you provide links to substantiate your claims of increased music sales linked to P2P piracy? Thanks.

Here's a start

More on the Ipso-Reid study covered here. The original study isn't available through their website, unless you look a lot harder than I did.

Here's more on the Jupiter study

Still more

Liebowitz writes about it, but his only purpose was to conclude that filesharing doesn't hurt the music business.

ZDNet reports on what is probably the same Jupiter study

This article sits right in the middle of the issue, but certainly hints at an Odyssey study supporting my point.

Here's a study about studies

This came out during the height of the Metallica fight against Napster

You can google for more if you're not satisfied with these. :)

I believe they sold 1 or 2 copies of UnixWare in the past 10 years. Oh, they sold a Linuxlicense too.

Fro, this article.
IBM's claim that SCO violated the GPL is the sixth of 10 counterclaims, the last four of which address patent infringement by SCO with regard to IBM's Linux products.
In the first counterclaim, IBM alleged that SCO breached contract with the "Amendment X," a modification of the original Unix contract IBM signed with AT&T in 1985. Amendment X grants IBM "irrevocable" and "perpetual" rights to Unix. By filing a suit, IBM's 45-page suit says, SCO has failed to honor the amendment made in 1996.

"Novell brings all of this to the table, with enterprise support. Now you don't have to hack OpenLDAP, and sell it to the "Pointy-Hair" crowd."

That's assuming one could get the damn thing to cooperate.

Anyway. SGI Boosting Linux to 128 Processors . Linux is growing up.

Sorry, it wasn't in the slashdot story! I got off an OSnews article ("Attorneys Critical of SCO"). Here.

There were a lot of other good links in the OSnews article. It's still showing today.

Here is a reply to a portion of Eben's paper by another lawyer, it brings up some good points.

Here is some more legal commentary. It seems to dispute some of the OSDL's position - but comes up with other reasons why SCO's case may be flawed.

Here's another lawyer (Australia), saying don't "drop your pants" to SCO.

Finally, here's IBM planning a response to SCO's amended complaint. Once again SCO's web site seems to omit some important issues.

Of the millions of phones shipped, only a small percentage of them support full HTML and Javascript (PocketPC-based ones, Palm-based, and Symbian-based).

From http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php /1598081:
An estimated 50 million Java handsets are currently on the market and shipments of Java handsets exceeded PDA shipments in 2002, said Gold, adding that one out of ever ten cell phones in the world will be Java phones by the end of the year.

"The answer is increasingly just Java," Gold told internetnews.com.

"By end 2003, the size of the market that one can address with Java will still be larger than that of all PDAs and smartphones (such as Nokia Communicator and the Ericsson or Samsung equivalents) together, even if PDAs and smartphones grow by 100 percent in units this year (probably an unrealistically high assumption)," said Gold.

But I agree, a utility like this is best suited for the client.

• RIAA member
• GPL violator
• DMCA wielder
• Freedom hater
• DRM purveyor

Google does not need for the IPO market to improve much. In fact, it hasn't been that bad this year at all. With such a strong name, they could easily raise over 1 billion from an IPO. Further, Sergey says they have no plans to go IPO anytime soon.

Keep in mind, the RIAA uses file names as the primary method of finding file swappers before sending out the scare team. These same file names have a good chance of being planted by the RIAA and thier contractors. They are trying to play on both sides of the fence here. IMHO, before an actual case goes to court against an individual file sharer, they are going to need more then a list of file names to have a case. I believe the main reason for the Verizon case was to try to keep the courts out of the loop as long as possible so they could try thier luck with the DMCA and cease and desist letters on shaky legal grounds. No court or judge would consider these tainted file plantings and a file lists from some IP address a copyright violation.

Just spend some time reading Microsoft's own product announcements, interviews, etc... they don't make any effort to hide any of this. You'd pretty much have to be blind not to see what's going on... oh wait, that pretty much describes most of /. poster community.

First, there's Longhorn...
TechWeb
WinSuperSite

But don't forget to research Jupiter, Yukon and Kodiak, and be sure to look at the extended feature sets of these products and how they can interoperate.

A quick search for some time lines got me this, but there are lots of places that keep track of this stuff:
Internet.com

Some general info on Jupiter
JupiterResearch

...and don't forget MS' own efforts to push rights enabled content into the marketplace:

for one example there is...
Microsoft
...but don't forget, games, their deal with small movie studios, etc...

MS is working with British Telecom to develop online applications and media support including appication rental that can be used for an added nominal monthly fee... all of this is web browser accessable, and while the dot's are pretty thin to find, I've heard in the developer circles that once it is stablized around MSN 9, MS is looking to offer this service out to XBox live subscribers.
news.com"

...and then there is the MIIS layer that just was released to support data tracking.
MetaConnections
"MIIS has its own data store (the metaverse) into which it consolidates information drawn from the connected systems. Rules can be applied to determine how objects in a connected system are projected into, or join with objects already in, the metaverse and to create objects in the connected system (i.e. provisioning). Other rules specify how each attribute within the object should flow into or out of the metaverse. The sophistication of these rules allows customers to create fully automated identity data integration solutions."

...or this quote:
TheWhir
"Customers have told us they need an end-to-end solution for managing identity information and access rights," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president for the Windows Server Group at Microsoft. "With today's delivery of MIIS, we bring provisioning and metadirectory capabilities together in a single solution that enables customers to create and manage user identities with a single consistent view across the enterprise and throughout the complete life cycle of identity management."

I would point you to the Market announcements on the MS site, but they are oddly missing... but then Google saves the day here...
MS care of Google #1
MS care of Google #2

...and on and on and on... Do I really need to give you more links... I suppose it's pointless because with most of the people who can't see this, I could drop a bible of text proof in your face and you'd still denign it.

Microsoft makes no efforts to hide what they're planning, and doing. It's all out there in your face if you bother to take the time to read it.

Big business wants start-to-end accountability for ALL DATA, and they are going to get it, and Microsoft is going

I meant HERE

I recall that in its dying days Napster was talking about adding this to appease the recording industry. The variation then was from a company called Relatable. Sounds like Shawn is stuck in a recursive loop.

Ok, so there's power over ethernet, and broadband over power, and voice over IP. Convergence?

1. Spertus v Kozmo
2. Ferguson v Friendfinder
3. California v PW Marketing LLC

UnitedLinux has a partner program

If you sign up as UnitedLinux ISV partner or certify on UnitedLinux, you have an (indirect) contractual relationship with SCO Group, Inc.

We know what SCO thinks about contracts.

So any volunteers to sign up?

Yet another failed attempt by Microsoft to break into an industry in which they do not have a monopoly. Considering how much stock Balmer and company have been selling, I think they see the writing on the wall, and want to cash out before the world realizes that the glory days of Microsoft are over.

There was a story a few days ago about distributed computing and search engines... Ahh... here it is. You don't suppose that Microsoft hopes to make use of DC software in the updated Messenger client to index pages?