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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.

Anyway interesting concept.

-----

i need a ciggie bbl

...can be found here. Good ol' news.google.com. :)

slogg vorbis is shit. Stop whining about your fucking audio codec that no one will ever fucking suport because no one wants it. MP3 is the standard and ogg will fade away into nothing.

Firstly, how can a codec that's gaining momentum "fade into nothing"? It's not mainstream now, but neither were computers, UNIX, digital audio, etc.

Second, more and more companies are picking up OGG Vorbis support. Why is that? Well, let's see. It's a completely FREE codec that is continually getting better. It's supported by an organization that's dedicated to creating free multimedia codecs for use in open, free, and commercial use -- all without charging a cent. Most importantly, however, OGG Vorbis IS superior to WMA and MP3. If you think otherwise, try looking into some of the various listening tests. Or check out Vorbis' Listen page. If you're such a blind zealot that you won't actually test various codecs, you have no right to praise or flame any codec for any reason.

Grow up and leave the technology details to people who know what they're doing and talking about.

Since everyone's feeling lazy today, I guessed it was my turn to find a URL.

A check here reveals that:

1. "With the FCC action, IBOC technology is the approved digital broadcast AM/FM system for the U.S. market...."

The really cool part is that this is one company's technology that's been approved for use on the Public Airwaves (TM).

2."The Federal Communications Commission ... approved the digital broadcasting technology of iBiquity Digital, which allows digital broadcasting in the AM and FM bands."

So look ... it's not just FM.

3. "IBiquity's investors include 15 of the nation's top radio broadcasters, including ABC, Clear Channel and Viacom; financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan Partners, Pequot Capital and J&W Seligman; and strategic partners Ford Motor Company, Harris, Texas Instruments and Visteon...."

With investors like that, clearly we're going to get better and better quality music. We should Pequot happy. The Harris standing up on the back of my neck.

4. "one of the most sweeping advancements in broadcasting in nearly a century...."

Translation: same old crap will now come in clear as a bell. A big tolling Bell of Death.

There's a review here.
According to the review, zire is amongst the lightest of the palm family.

This article, at UltraWideband Planet suggest that 802.11 is doomed. Perhaps most interestingly, the Ultrawideband site is from the same people that offer 802.11-Planet, Internet.com.

Could it be that most users on the internet are just there to send e-mail back & forth between their families, or to hang out in chat rooms?

This is because most people do not need broadband and cannot justify the increased cost just for the online activities listed above. That is why by 2005 broadband will will just be catching up to dial-up percentage wise for users of the internet..

There is also Raytheon's SilentRunner and Niksun's NetDetector. But while the privacy wonks are running scared, they are missing the essential usefulness of these tools. It's for forensics - something goes wrong, you can go back and see what it was. I can't comment for the other tools, but NetIntercept makes digging 500,000+ connections from 2 weeks ago easy.

Yes, I work for Sandstorm. Our motto, "Tools with Sharp Edges". Its a fun company.

In a releated story from dc.internet.com:

Mobilepro Corp., with its subsidiary, Neoreach, Inc., a developer of semiconductor chips for third generation (3G) wireless communication services, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the RF Microelectronics Lab (RFIC) at the Information and Communications University in South Korea to co-develop a new semiconductor chip.

Under the agreement, engineering teams from Neoreach and RFIC will devote joint research and design expertise, staffing, facilities resources, project management, and testing for the development of an RF CMOS, a radio frequency chipset.

Ahhh.. You're right, I'm wrong... But I'll repeat the truly correct answer as I have already lured someone down the wrong path:

document.write("\u00A9".charCodeAt(0));

That provides the decimal, then you just have to convert to hex.

function Dec2Hex (Dec) { var a=Dec % 16; var b=(Dec - a)/16; hex="" + hexChars.charAt(b) + hexChars.charAt(a); return hex; }

Blatently ripped off from here

Now it makes sense why internet.com pulled their finger out and consolidated their very neglected holdings. They weren't just being nice at all. linuxnewbie has been screaming out for a face lift for over a year now. Competition did the trick.

I've noticed that whenever Meta group report on Linux they always denigrate it. There have been articles on ZDNET and similar places where positive things have been said by Gartner, IDC etc., but then at the end there are some words of doom from Meta Group: "it may not be ready", "there might be problems", "you can't yet run Linux on 1000 processor machines...".

For example, look at this article about Linux in investment banks. Positive news all the way through until:

But Meta Group programme director Ashim Pal says the cost of the platform is not the only consideration. 'The operating system is a relatively small part of the total cost of ownership. Purely focusing on the cost of the platform is deluded,' he said.

If you go their web-site and look for recent documents featuring Linux in the title you will find:

- Linux on the Mainframe: Nice Place to Visit, But...
- No Advantage From Linux PDAs
- Choose Palm or Pocket PC - Linux Only for Custom Apps
- Linux PDAs Offer Alternative for Low-End and Specialized Markets
- Companies Should Consider Limited Server-Based Linux Implementations
- Microsoft Criticizes Linux as Operating System Issues Move to Web Services Level
- ... Linux Management: More Hype than Substance
- Linux Dreams of Management Promotion.,
- Linux: Application Server Tiers or Tears?

I guess you can make your own minds up. BTW, Meta Group have been having a few problems themselves recently.

• the u.s. is the 3rd most populous country in the world, w/ a population of ~1/4 billion
• between 1/3 and 1/4 of the entire online population is from the u.s.

consider this flamebait if you like but don't bitch about "americacentrism" because some users are discussing a television show

You mean like This one?

Right there you go 7k of JavaScript goodness :)

This is even viewable in your browser so you can see how it'll look in Mozilla/IE/Konq...

BTW, do what I did and find the page that has a list of all of the colors and their names and use an array to list the name of the color too :) So you can say "I like the Fuschia background" :)

"In a slate of new television, radio and online ads, computer manufacturer Gateway (NYSE:GTW) is voicing its opposition to a bill that aims to curtail PC users' copying of music CDs.

The San Diego-based PC maker, which is busily promoting a computer setup designed for music and CD-burning enthusiasts in other ads, said its new advocacy campaign seeks to raise consumer awareness for the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act proposed by Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-S.C.)"

"Gateway said it had commissioned a survey last month that found that 44 percent of all owners of PCs in the U.S. also own a CD burner -- suggesting that consumers are not only fond of digital music technology, but they want to keep using it. Additionally, the survey found that 73 percent of those who said they downloaded music from the Internet say they now spend the same or more money on music purchases. Fifty-three percent of PC-owners said they would be more likely to buy a CD if they could first download one track from the Internet. Only 10 percent say they'd be less likely to buy given this ability. "

http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article/0,, 3531_1007071,00.html

RapidSite is not a Web server per se; rather, it is a virtual hosting service that runs on a personalized version of Apache. Because it is an extremely popular alternative to purchasing a dedicated Web server, RapidSite is commonly included in Web server listings for comparison purposes. In fact, RapidSite is the fifth most popular server according to the latest Netcraft Survey. It is also the the largest virtual Web site hosting system in the world with more than 45,000 domain names hosted on nearly 40,000 distinct IP addresses. When deciding which Web server best meets your needs, RapidSite is an option that you'll want to give careful consideration to as well.

Because of benchmarks like this? (Note how, ignoring the hardware cost for a moment, the top-of-the-line 16-processor IBM pSeries machine running zeus supports 2.5x more users than the best-available 8-processor IIS server.) Also, zeus (and, may be, netscape enterprise, etc.) is known to have better single-machine scalability because of serveral interesting I/O techniques it tends to use---these benefits are more pronounced when run on operating systems like solaris that support fine-grained user-level threads to kernel-level thread mappings. On top of the raw performance, many also support application-level clustering and redundancy (may be important for some portal sites that demand underlying data consistency, and, which, therefore, require more app-level work to scale-up/failover than just adding more server instances). However, for the vast majority of the sites out there that serve out mostly static and simple dynamic traffic, I think apache is more than sufficient (these sites tend to be bottlenecked by the n/w, not by the server), and I would pick apache anyday over IIS for simplicity, stability, and security reasons (even the humble tux server almost matches the best-available IIS5.0 on the same hardware in the benchmark above in terms of performance; there is no need to go into security/stability comparisons).

Make no mistake, guy, you should read this article to enlighten your vision of how broadband is going in U.S. and how this thing is lame in Europe (though wireless and portable devices have a significant growth registered in Europe).

Exists in U.S. an ideal dome for aggressive competition, actually communications' niche is tightly integrated with digital equipments' market, and U.S. already has dominance over the latter.

Is a good move for U.S. to stimulate competition over communications, thus when arrives the time consumers of computers & related devices be buying new equipments (believe me, or do you think that a pc lasts during a people's live?), U.S. will be very strong in both communications and equipment ramifications of IT.

Microsoft is supposed to be coming out with some tablet thing called Mira. While the idea sounds intersting, I don't think I need or want another Microsoft product.

Well, then I came across an annoucement at Internet Product Watch about this new Linux based tablet that seems pretty cool. Open OS... Open hardware... Good design, and the embedded universal remote control is pretty darn cool as well.

Think this would fly? Think it's another vapor-product?

HERE's a URL for this Linux thing.

Actually .. Attachmate's Emissary had it before Opera. :)

I jet remembered the name... NetJet. Can't find the company homepage so they probably washed out with the tide. I did find an article calling it it NetDeath. The complaint was that when misconfigured it would essentially DoS webservers and quadruple traffic requests. Good for the user, severe bitch for the site.

http://browserwatch.internet.com/news/story/peak 9. html

Thank goodness we have people like Eisner standing up for our rights to purchace entertainment at premium prices.

All you have to do is to look at the most popular sites on the web. And they are popular for a reason. Good content, easy user interface, quick navigation etc etc etc.

The best way to do this might very well be the W3C standard described here. Renowned usability guru Jakob Nielsen's site. He has TONS of information on how to design a site effectively. And maybe the most obvious thing to look at is the comaprisons between the top 10 sites on the net including yahoo, msn, google, disney etc (sorry, slashdot is not on the list). It compares the most basic parts of a website (colours, links, navigation bar etc). This gist of it all is, keep is as simple, clean and easy to use as you can possibly make it.

As long as you're converting, seems like it should be 16.8 Peta bits/20 Peta bits.

Oh, and your story link won't get botched by slashdot for being too long if you actually link it.

Computer Week online - top story on their home page today: LINK

sa.internet.com picked up the press release and covered it: LINK

Some additional media interviews were given today so there will likely be additional coverage. It's nice to see the press get most of the details correct :)

No wonder... Look:

eagle:~$ telnet www.itwales.com 80
Trying 137.44.2.121...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
eagle:~$ telnet www.itwales.com 80
Trying 137.44.2.121...
Connected to cscymru.swan.ac.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTML/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 Document Follows
Content-Length: 705
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 16:11:50 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 15:24:44 GMT
Server: OmniHTTPd/2.08

It's running this OmniHTTPd. I never used it, so I don't know if it's good or not. But it indicates the server is running 95/98 or NT.

And we all know that just Linux (or BSD, or your favorite Unix flavor) can stand the power of an Alan Cox interview being slashdotted.

Check these:

Group blasts Internet Explorer 5.5 for lack of Web standards

Review of Netscape6... see paragraph 2 damning IE W3C compliance

IE 5.5 criticized for lack of Web standards

Microsoft claims conformance to CSS level 1 and DOM level 1 in IE6, so maybe they have done an about face on this issue (much like suddenly deciding security is more important than idiot-friendliness). Unfortunately, 95% of the current Windows user base is using IE5 because it comes with the OS (through Win2K at least).

As a developer who has to provide web interfaces from time to time, I can promise you that it is a lot of work to make a site compatible with both IE and Netscape. Each one drops the ball when it comes to W3C conformance. I guess it's encouraging that MS is attempting to implement standards compliance into one of their products.

internet.com for late in 2001. -- 81.1% between Palm, Handspring, and Sony.

-- Multics

Another thing is that article is misleading; they really received $12M in funding, and added another $31M in repayable loans from the Canadian government. Again, the numbers quoted in the article are Canadian dollars, not US.

Several terabit router companies have failed (such as Ironbridge ) and others are having problems, a la Avici along with Nexabit.

For more entertainment, read the article and comments in Light Reading.

It's not the bandwidth, it's the services. Besides, who can afford to provision 65,000 OC-192s?

http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/a/acronym.html

I should have used this dictionary the first time.

The unpronounceable version of an Acronym is an 'Initialism'....

http://boston.internet.com/news/article/0,1928,200 1_950451,00.html
Public free search engine didn't pan out for them.

If this is the search engine they'll be taking down. I can assure you, no one will care that its gone nor will the CIA ever accomplish anything.

LinuxHardware.org does hardware reviews, but of course, they plug their own stuff.

Internet.com has a decent hardware review site, but this is mainly geared towards server hardware.

ZDNet also has a pretty decent Linux section, with hardware reviews and compatability lists.

And, if you want to get straight to business, Google has a wealth of information regarding tech review sites.

Hope this helps,

Ted

Circuit City is moving in the same direction. They're headquartered here in Richmond, VA. An acquaintance of mine is a lead programmer on a team responsible for creating custom GTK apps for their POS systems. I don't know all the details, but I believe they're using Red Hat as their base distro (which, I guess, isn't that suprising).

Other people that are deploying Linux are Home Depot, Burlington Coat Factory, and The New York Stock Exchange. Of course there's also IBM, but they hardly need mentioning.

I think it's fair to debate how well Linux fits certain needs, but so far there has been solid proof that it fits some very large needs for some vary large companies. By 2003, I think the outlook is nothing but positive. Shooting for world domination is a grand goal, and capturing the desktop world would seem to be a huge piece of completing that goal. As much as we talk about it, I think we all understand that our grandmothers won't be using Linux anytime soon. In the meantime I'll be perfectly happy knowing that Linux is being used for the high-scale, back-end systems, while Fischer Price My First Operating System hangs out on the desktop.

Flamebait, troll, call it what you like.

I downloaded and installed the latest version of mozilla (on a Win98/AMD machine). It ran smoothly, rendered a lot more pages correctly than that horrible CSS-less Netscape does. And it doesn't crash (although from what I've seen mileage varies amongst different users).

However, I seriously question the relevance of ANY project that tries to 'start a revolution' in the browser market. The de facto situation has arisen that a browser is part of the OS. This may have been accomplished in part by scheming, bully tactics and FUD, but it is true nonetheless.

So you have the situation that someone who buys a PC gets an OS, including a browser, installed on it. If said PC is bought at, say, CompUSA you have a 99.9% chance that that OS is some Windows version. Regarding the person who buys the PC: there's a 95% or even higher chance that he or she has little or no affinity with computers, let alone can compare the compliance of different W3C standards. The most likely desire of that person for the browser is that it renders web pages the way their creators designed them. Now, who do you think those creaters have in mind?

The browser with the largest market share!

WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Web standards are being set by Microsoft, and people who get a browser installed that complies to THOSE standards flawlessly are unlikely to replace it. As are most Linux/Mac users by the way. So Mozilla is destined to attain a market share of no more than 1%, if even that is possible (personally I think Opera's current market share of .25% among IT professionals says it all, really).

You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation

Don't get me started.

No one force you to tweak it if you don't want to. There's always stable version of Linux for production use. The fact that people don't like doing document, spreadsheet or presentation in Linux is the reluctance to learn different ways of doing same things. A Mac user wouldn't like do that in Windows, for example. Your arguement is very misleading.

I must admit MS offers best of the line office suite, but it doesn't mean other office suite is too inferior in comparison.

If you say it's a massive multi-players game, many people are doing serious game playing here.

Sometime I really feel like there's a need to mod some posters as troll or flamebait.

Furthermore, from an advertiser's point of view, 30 seconds of a potential customer's attention should be a lot more valuable than standard banner ads which most people ignore anyway... Perhaps the CPM price charged by AdCritic could be even higher....

The news article about Magic Lantern, which you apparently failed to read when it was posted to Slashdot, contains the following text:

"When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: 'Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.'" (my emphasis)

So unless the FBI has gotten a court order against the 84.8% of web surfers who use Internet Explorer, this is pure FUD.

Sheesh.

stew77 asks:

who's using IE anyway?

Roughly 85% of people surfing are using Internet Explorer. With computer software, there's alot to be said for "It's preinstalled so I don't have to do anything to get it". Otherwise, I'm positive their share would be much smaller.

So I would suggest that he could think about checking the refferer as this site is showing and maybe directs all users that come from a search engine to a page where he offers a search engine that is limited to his site. Since the referrer also includes the whole search string he could maybe even use it to fill out his search form.

I would even prefer this method because it often happens to me that I enter a site via link from a search engine and then I find out that the result page is just a part of a frameset and its missing properties like Javascript variables. If I would redirect search engine users to a defined starting point on my site they would have less troubles (Don't start a disscussion about the sense and use of frames here :-) )

Damnit, muffed up the link.

Neilson

Based on the National Average, this really wouldn't be too expensive for anyone in particular, however the logistics of the whole thing are insane.

This 'subscription' service is already in use today on several websites, however at a much higher price. I know of several web sites that has users subscribing so they don't see banner ads.

To back up my claims on the national average, go to this link..

Based on this, the AVERAGE (I know this doesn't represent most surfers of slashdot) charge per family unit will be about $10.00 extra a month. A bit high eh?

QUESTION: Hi. You talked about broadband and that it was at about 10 percent of households, and that brings to mind streaming media, and I would appreciate it if one of you could address the various aspects of streaming media with regard to where Microsoft is right now compared to its competitor, and where it's expected to be with respect to its competitor in, say, nine months, and then how streaming media plays out in terms of the lawsuit, what kinds of ramifications might be expected.

MR. GATES: ...The second area, the video area, is the tougher of the two, because that really does require this high speed connection. And most people at work have high speed connections. So you can take a little news clip or video conference, and use that quite easily. In the U.S., as I mentioned, only 10 percent of homes have broadband. Actually, in Korea it's 40 percent of homes, but the U.S. is close to being second among broadband penetration. We'd like to see that go up. Of course, the key element of that is that the price has to come down somewhat from the $50 a month in order to see the wider spread usage.

If you're wondering what NUMA stands for (as I did), you can get a good 2 sentence definition at the Webopedia

I haven't seen this on the news pages yet, but I just read that Sun has gotten together with a bunch of other companies, 32 to be exact, to basically compete against MS and are calling themselves The Liberty Alliance:

http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/insights/outloo k/article/0,,10535_908411,00.html

The difference between this and MS is that the Liberty Alliance is made up of many companies and so the data will hopefully be more secure. In fact, that's one reason they formed it (so they say).. because they don't trust MS with all that personal info.

Anyway, I guess the larger sites will still support passport just because they don't want to isolate users. eBay is quoted in the article as saying just that.. they'll support any and all, even though they are part of the Liberty Alliance. Wonder who will win...

But honestly, where do we set that limit?

Whois for "powerline.com" returns names with e-mail addresses on "powertrust.com". Whois for "powertrust.com" returns some of the same names and addresses, with e-mail addresses on "powerline.com". So we can conclude that "powerline.com" and "powertrust.com" are under the same ownership. There's interlinked domain ownership with "powerfulnetworks.com"(an ISP), and "powerinternet.org". (Clearly, these guys like "power").

Most of these organizations are located at 1701 S. Mays St, #J-121, Round Rock, Texas. At the same address are Gino's Pizzaria (#B), Eyecare Vision Centers (#R) , and My Choice Liquors (#N). Aerial photography confirms this is a mall. The "J-121" probably indicates some kind of mail drop, although it's not a MailBoxes Etc. location.

Going to "powertrust.com", we see just a logo and the tag line "The possibilities beyond the power". The page description for that page reads:

• PowerTrust.com is an Internet-based energy company offering savings for homeowners and small businesses. PowerTrust.com also offers such beyond-the-meter benefits as low-cost Internet access with no long-term contracts, domestic long-distance telephone rates for a flat 5.9 per minute anytime day or night with no monthly fee, and discounts on other home products and services.

So they have a full range of vaporware services.

PowerLine itself is at 11180 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA, which is an office building. "PowerTrust" is also at that location - listed as an oil and gas company.

Digging further, it gets worse. PowerTrust is in trouble for "slamming" natural gas services, switching customers to their service without authorization. They've "withdrawn" from the Washington DC area gas market, with the "encouragement" of the local regulatory authorities. It's not clear that they did any physical delivery of gas; it just seems to have been a remarketing thing.

A press release from PowerTrust indicates that PowerLine is a business unit of PowerTrust. It's supposedly a "joint venture with 'M@innet.net'", which provides the power line networking technology. Can't find "M@innet.net" in anything but PowerLine press releases, though.

So that's a brief rundown, and it doesn't look good.

This doesn't mean the technology is out of reach. There's a consortium for power-line networking: HomePlug. There's an evaluation kit available from Intellon. Includes source code for Linux drivers. Speed is around 8Mb/s now. They hope to get to 50Mb/s in a few years.

Lower speed systems are shipping. Easyplug, at 2Mb/s, is available now.

Like DSL, this is one of those things that just barely works because the transmission medium is so noisy, but can be made to work with very elaborate modulation techniques. Here's how HomePlug does it.

Hello Gladys.

Here on Slashdot we use the Shift key. It produces UPPER CASE letters that you can start your sentences with!

And yes, I know, IHBT.

Dude. His name is Reichard. Slashdot and almost everyone here seems to be mis-spelling it.