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First of all,

Just because it is ARRL pointing out these concerns, you should not assume that the only people negatively affected by BPL are amateur radio operators.

The military and local police and fire use frequencies in this range. I'd kind of like for that 'elite few' to have communications services that work.

Here is a quote from an interesting article:
http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/articles/6358

"The HF frequency spectrum -- from 3MHz to 30MHz -- and the VHF spectrum - 30MHz to 80MHz -- are the two that would suffer the most interference from Access BPL. These spectrums are used by thousands of public safety agencies: police departments, fire departments, and emergency medical services. They are also used by the military, by government entities at all levels, by ships and planes, and by many other licensed users. The communications of all of these critical functions would be subjected to the interference generated by Access BPL."

Secondly,
BPL does not solve one of the biggest problems that most people intuitively think it will solve. It does not get broadband to the rural areas. When most people hear about "BPL", they think "Wow, we have power lines going everywhere. What a great idea! We can get everyone connected.". The thing they don't realize is that the broadband signal is not being injected into the power lines until they get very close to the final destination. It is a last mile solution. Not a last 100 miles solution. Up until the point that the signal gets injected, you need the same infrastructure that you need for the other solutions.

If someone comes up with a BPL solutions that can be deployed at a reasonable cost and won't trash the radio spectrum, more power to them. I know that some companies are trying to do just that. But, so far, there has not been much success.

And Finally:
Relocate amateur radio? You obviously understand very little about amateur radio. You might want to at least understand what services it provides before you make such a statement.

For example: After the December 2004 Tsunami in South Asia, the only communications possible out of the area took place on the very bands that are currently in jeopardy due to BPL. Any bands the service would have been "relocated" to would not have worked for the distances involved.

The radio spectrum is a valuable resource. Much more valuable that the services potentially provided by the current BPL solutions.

There are many ways to still make money with a product even though it is open source. I recently did a paper on it and found this site to be informative. http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/feature/314

It was stored on a Windows box?

botnet
holes
obsessed with botnets

http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/feature/21464 gives some insight about this and how The Weather Chanel percieves and uses OSS

The majority of the shareholders are some institutional investors and Ralph Yarro. That's not to say that there aren't some people shorting it. We have seen what looks suspiciously like a short squeeze. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_squeeze

The behaviour of this stock was best described by Melanie Hollands: closely held and thinly traded. That makes it extremely susceptible to manipulation. Thus the PaintBlaster. http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=04 /06/21/2017216

Someone should define what they mean when they say OSS software,

if they are meaning in the BSD way, MS has less of a legitimate beef. But if they are thinking GPL way, then I think MS probably has a very legitimate beef.

'if a program "can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then the GPL does not apply to it"'

If public money is used to push certain products, outcomes are presented for public use but you are not allowed use it, even though they paid for a portion of it; I think lots of companies probably would have a beef with it.

If it's adopting licenses that basically directly prevent them from doing something, I would very much expect them to have a problem with it and quash the recomendation. If it's truely a free license with no restrictions than I would expect them to have no problems with it.

The author, Ryan Paul, has written other articles about copyright before, like this introduction to intellectual property law that was published at IT Managers Journal. I tried looking up some terms from the article, it doesn't look like wikipedia even has an entry on "ordre public".

and show them this http://management.itmanagersjournal.com/print.pl?s id=05/04/01/2112246

It's sort of an in-joke. Look at the 2004 article on ITMJ ScuttleMonkey's post links to, which was my final debunking of the whole Phantom/Infinium business, written immediately after a banquet Infinium held for "investors and friends" at Michael's On East, an upscale restaurant in Sarasota, Florida.

During the banquet, which Infinium founder Tim Roberts *insisted* I had to come to (possibly because I'm the only tech journalist in or near Sarasota), he and former Microsoftie Kevin Bachus, who was Infinium President at the time, kept asking me what I thought of their latest business and marketing plan, as in, "Would it succeed?" (Also, Tim kept asking, "How's the food?" which was decent but not great.) And did my much younger friend, Matt Moen, who came with me, think he'd be interested in the Phantom, being he was the "target" age for their marketing program?

As it says in the article, the only interesting or potentially marketable product Matt and I saw from Infinium at that point was their keyboard/mouse thing, which looked like it would be kind of cool for couch computing. Kevin told us they weren't interested in the lapdesk as a product, that they were concentrating on the console and game service, which would debut shortly. Remember: this was in *2004*, and they'd already been saying "Next month, really, we promise, we'll have a product to show you" for nearly two years before that.

Now the lapdesk seems to be the only product the company is actually able to bring to market. So Matt and I get to have a big laugh (which you are free to share), and say, "We told you so!" :)

- Robin

Oh, you want to talk about ROI? Let's look at how the value of Apple's share has moved in contrast with Dell and their ilk:

http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/blob.pl?id=424489 9e4e6356c1df1ec7b8b67d8578

pwned.

You might wanna read this article as well. It offers a great introduction to the VoIP security issues.

Will SCO be around to collect if it wins?

For those interested to know more about the security issues associated to VoIP, you may wish to read this article. I think it's a great article as it talked about the three important aspects of VoIP security: confidentiality, availability and integrity.

The suicides referred to are those of Val Noorda Kreidel (daughter of technology entrepreneur and Canopy founder Ray Noorda) and Robert Penrose (Canopy Employee). See this blog entry for details and links.

Also:
http://sltrib.com/business/ci_2617160
http://management.itmanagersjournal.com/print.pl?s id=05/03/28/071212
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143850&cid =12055828

http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/article.pl?sid=05 /04/22/0340218

"How companies should handle Sarbanes-Oxley compliances"

Obviously. But I wasn't the one claiming that the logo implies compatiblity, that was you. And the logo looks just the same on all implementations, afaik.:)

So what is it now, does the logo or doesn't it mean that implementations are compatible?

For another intersting bit of information that you seem to be missing, there is no backwards compatibility between 'point-releases' of a Sun implementation either. See http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/compatibility.html# incompatibilities .

Why are you assuming I am not checking them for myself?

Because you believe that Sun's implementation is compatible, but you don't know it and refuse to check. Instead you voluntarily chose to rely on hearsay. You defend relying on hearsay, saying that it doesn't matter for you because you don't implement VMs, which I find pretty amusing, as in another breath you say:

However, something without the 'Java' label, indicating a TCK pass, is not going anywhere near my commercial servers.

That's pretty funny, as you don't seem to really know what the Java label indicates, have not seen the test suites, and apparently have an idea of compatibility that James Gosling makes jokes about in interviews[1].

What I find really fascinating is that Sun released 1.4.2 with a known compatibility test suite failure according to the page I quoted above. So much for the logo guaranteeing passing the test suite, I guess.

cheers, dalibor topic

[1] 'Well, I tested it myself and it seems to work OK for me,' or 'Hi, a bunch of my friends tested it and it worked OK.' See http://programming.itmanagersjournal.com/programmi ng/05/03/17/0131245.shtml?tid=56

The first thing one must recognize is that open source commodotizes a product. So it's intellectual property has no value, and a company must provide some other value-add in order to make money. That turns most software companies' licensing models upside-down, where the license to the IP is the primary sale and the support, documentation, etc are secondary.

Business Models

• Give Away the Recipe, Open a Restaurant - This is where you give away the program and charge for install/support/services/training/certification/do cumentation. Due to companies considering the GPL viral, this is the primary way to make money off of GPL code. Example: most Linux retailers.
• Loss Leader - You sell the software package (support too) at a much discounted price in the hopes of getting customers to buy your other products. Example: Netscape
• Widget Frosting - An adjunct product (that is currently an expense for a primary product, rather than a profit-making product) is open-sourced to improve its quality. Example: SGI + Samba
• Accessorizing - Sell accessories: books, hardware, pre-packaged systems. Example: O'Reilly

Business Strategies

• Clayton Christensen's Conservation of Modularity - You make money at the borders to modular (open source) layers. Example: Sell proprietary software that runs on Linux.
• Dual License - Fee for commercial distribution rights and more features
• Consulting - Use OSS to provide higher margins at lower prices
• Subscription - Provide support for long-term "maintenance" revenue. Example: RedHat (for the most part).
• Patronage - Drive standards, enter entrenched markets, commoditize competitors. Example: IBM + Apache vs. MS IIS, IBM + Eclipse vs. Sun & MS.
• Hosted - Use OSS to provide a service.
• Embedded - Use OSS in an embedded system to save on license costs.

Open Source might not exactly be a "career path." But it is, imho, an enabler - something that you can use to launch a business and, hopefully, profit from.

here is what I had to say in response to one comment somebody else made, regarding making money / feeding the family, and open-source.

This IT Managers Journal article, or this book: Innovation Happens Elsewhere : Open Source as Business Strategy are also of interest on this topic, I think.

I kind of LIKED Giant Antispyware, even given the niggles you pointed out. It works well, if the interface is infuriating. What I think is hilarious is Microsoft didn't know that Giant had a contract whereby it still has to provide updates to Sunbelt software--who essentially have the same program for sale--for the next few years.

BWAHAHAHAAA!!!

The other humorous thing is that the interface hasn't changed AT ALL since a month ago when they acquired it. It took MS a MONTH to change all instances of GIANT with Microsoft.

You know, someone should tell Microsoft that Openoffice has a "Find and Replace" feature. Maybe they should try it. It's free!

The first top 10 list I found in a few minutes of Googling is the top 10 PC software titles for 2003:

1. TurboTax 2002 Deluxe, Intuit
2. Norton Antivirus 2003, Symantec
3. TurboTax 2002, Intuit
4. Norton Antivirus, 2004, Symantec
5. TurboTax 2002 Multi State 45, Intuit
6. Taxcut 2002 Deluxe, Block Financial
7. MS Windows XP Home Ed Upgrade, Microsoft
8. MS Office XP Student & Teacher Edition, Microsoft
9. Taxcut 2002 State, Block Financial
10. Norton Internet Security 2003, Symantec
Source: The NPD Group/NPD Techworld

Intuit's tax software is available for the Mac, and the latest version of Quicken ships preinstalled on all Macs. Microsoft Office is available for the Mac. Norton Antivirus is available for the Mac, though you can certainly live without it. Norton Internet Security is not available, and not really needed anyway. Hell, even Windows XP Home can run on the Mac if you buy Virtual PC or the "Pro" version of Mac Office that includes it.

The article with this list does not say that games were excluded, so I am assuming that this means no games sold enough copies in 2003 to make the top 10 for all Windows software titles.

~Philly

Nothing is inherently better than the other, Linux or Windows. Don't forget yesterday's Linux security article.

Insightful my ass! This relativist "all views are equally valid" philosophy you've fallen into (along with the main stream media) is complete BS.

Nothing is perfect, and you should use the right tool for the right job (games == XP, work == Linux for me), for sure, but in terms of security Microsoft's operating systems are fundamentally worse than anything else out there. That doesn't mean that Linux or OSX is perfectly secure, but they're much better than any MS product. Whether you measure it by dollar cost to companies, or number of actual (not theoretical) exploits, MS products are more insecure than any *nix. Don't you even remember the millions of USD damage viruses and worms caused last year on MS systems alone?

The truth of the matter is that Linux is by default, even without hardening, vastly more secure than XP. And the security gap is increasing, not decreasing.

If you mean the grsecurity nonsense on ./ yesterday, the only story there is about some big-mouth egotist sounding off and the desperate MS apologists eagerly believing what they want to believe. See this and this .

In case you were also thinking about the uselib ./ nonsense of Jan 07th (here), Fedora core 2 had the patched kernel available on Jan 03. The public announcement of the problem was after it was fixed and had made it way into distribution updates (unless I'm totally misreading the changelogs). Wasn't the advisory this MS update fixes was released months ago. Bit of a difference perhaps?

I guess the article is wrong then? - if so that'll remind me *not* to read it in future.

Quote from http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/article. pl?sid=04/11/13/1331243

"Additionally, the Windows firewall now communicates with users on a more detailed level. Unfortunately, the Windows firewall still does not attempt to control outgoing traffic, so you'll need a personal firewall from a third-party vendor for full protection."

Very interesting analysis. From what you're projecting, it's not too far a leap to a subscription based model, which is where MS has wanted to head all along. (Remember the hue and cry when they announced moves in this direction before?)

It's also somewhat similar to the way Apple rolls out OS X updates. (That has also caused consternation among a small vocal minority of OS X users that don't want to pay for upgrades but don't want to be "left behind".)

Red Hat, Sun, Covalent, and others are embracing subscription models.

So it wouldn't surprise me to see MS try and put a subscription model under the radar. And it might not be such a bad thing, now that MS is facing pricing pressure from OSS.

Sorry, you called me out on my laziness ;-) It took a bit to find it, it was posted on slashdot a while back, here is the article:

IT Managers Journal

You may find some information on possible reasons here

According to this article, they are making 2 changes in their accounting practices. 1) The one you already explained about recongizing the revenue per day, and 2) Shifting some recognition from the first month of the contract to the final month. (Which you mentioned but didn't elaborate on.)

The effects of the first change should be small, since it is just making their accounting more fine-grained. The effects of the second change could be big. It will shrink a LOT of their older statements, and help to make their current statements look bigger than they would have been otherwise. I don't know enough about accounting to say if this is a more 'correct' way to account for the revenue, but if I were a cynic I'd say it is a convenient way for them to make their current and future earnings look larger...

There's a great piece on this whole thing by Melanie Hollands in the IT Manager's Journal that goes into excruciating detail on this topic. RH is doing nothing wrong. It's a normal happening in the business world. The use of the term "Ambulance chasers" in the original post was dead on. I don't particularly like nor dislike RH but this kind of greedy BS that Goodkind Labaton Rudoff & Sucharow LLP are doing smells of the same stench as TSG & Microsoft.

Relax, this is just a rally on an overall downward trend - they are still doomed. What happens is that investors think the worst is over following bad news and buy back-in; they'll dump again on the next set of bad news - SCOX has another financial coming up, and there are show and tell dates in the IBM case looming too. Then there are people who need to buy stock to cover shorts; the higher the stock goes the less they make. There's lots more insight into this kind of thing from Melanie Hollands of IT Manager's Journal right here if you are interested.

However, I do want to mention that it is possible (although I have no direct evidence at all) that this is a stock that may have been "ramped" from time to time. Stock ramping is a form of price manipulation, and occurs when some market participants act simultaneously to push up a stock price. This kind of action can be done at times when a stock price threatens to fall below, or stay below, important threshold levels such as a conversion ratio connected with a merger or convertible deal, or redemption level associated with, say, a PIPE deal.

Phase 1. We know SCO's business plan is flawed.

Phase 2. The Stockmarket knows that SCO's business plan is flawed. The share price is jumping about because people just like to speculate in the short term.

Phase 3. And Now baystar knows SCO's business plan is flawed (and finds a technicality to get their shares back)

Phase 4. ??? [The obligatory gnome-esc gap in the logic]

Phase 5. Profit? haha.. not this time. Go Directly into Administration. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200. Darl can look forward to having tux inserted, lovingly, into his anus by his boyfriend in prison :D

Simon.

Actually, we ran an article on (OSDN owned) IT Managers Journal a few weeks back about hiring open source developers that mentioned checking a candidate's posts on Slashdot and other community sites.

(A link to that article was on Slashdot, come to think of it.)

- Robin

Aside from the annual subscription rate for the software, they also stand to make money on selling hardware and services for infrastructure from these deals. Even if the actual office suite is be a loss leader (which I do not believe to be the case, but I could be wrong), it still brings in a tremendous amount of income on other fronts which would make it analagous to Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

Well, first off, $15 just doesn't jive.

I'm willing to say maybe $150... anyways...

>If we assume for a moment that half of these are defective, this means it would only cost an additional $15, on average, to make perfect LCDs with no bad pixels.

Well, at one point (a long while ago, but I digress) the success rate with LCDs was 10%.

It's now 18%.

That's at the current max 10 dead pixel rates (depends on who makes it). I would think you can chop those numbers by 10 or more if you want perfection. That makes a $150 LCD $1500 to make perfect, not to mention disposal costs.

Most consumer products cost about 20% - 50% of the original price to manufacture (or so it seems from my poking about), which would mean the $1500 LCD becomes a $3000 - $7500 LCD when it's on the shelves of your local Best Buy. And that's for a 15" LCD.

Who the hell will pay that much for one? I sure wouldn't.

But embracing in which direction? Maybe they're just softening people up for Microsoft Linux.

Our brainy heroine and penguin loving paralegal babe, PJ at Groklaw, posted an article covering some New Year's trend spotting. Some of the goodies:

1. Invester's Business Daily makes up its Top 10 Tech Stories of the year without mentioning Microsoft in any context.

2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.)

3. The example of Smart Displays, where per-user licensing inhibits even Microsoft's innovation, as cited in a Register article:

"The final nail in its coffin was Microsoft's absurd decision to kow-tow to the tin god of its licensing agreements. If you took your smart display downstairs, nobody in the den with the computer could use it. Single user licence, repeated Microsoft marketing droids. 'We can't compromise our standard licensing policy."

4. From the counter example of what can be, in the MagicBike project of the Parsons School of Design, PJ muses: "The idea is, when everyone gets to play, innovation is the result. Innovation doesn't come from money or walled-in projects, although money can help implement ideas. Innovation comes from people, and as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, talent can show up simply anywhere, where you least expect it. The lower the barrier to entry, the more likely you are to get wonderful ideas. It's one reason I keep it possible to leave anonymous comments on Groklaw, despite the down side to that."

5. Vince Cerf's vision of the ubiquitous net is cited, reaching even to other planets.

PJ concludes: "Yes, [Microsoft] must adapt in order to be part of the future. I think it's a given that no one wants a wireless product that can only legally connect to one PC predetermined during setup. Not after somebody sent the mayor an email from a bike in Union Square station in NYC. Or even read about it. Once you have the concept and you see what is possible, you know what you know, and Brand X doesn't work for you after that. Like the song says, there's nothing like the real thing."

I know most of these points have been previously featured on /., but I like the compilation of them as a converging threat to Microsoft's paradigms that may cause significant rethinking in 2004.

Besides, I think I have a crush on PJ... :-)

try this.

http://www.goatse.cx.

Fixed link to the article - is here

Here

The link in the slashdot story just seems to point back to the slashdot itself.

The link above appears to be to /.
Here is the article on the IT Manager's Journal site.

And thanks to the person here who posted additional links. I take the Digital Divide very seriously, experiencing it first hand as a columnist and an individual. I suggest the nay-sayers here walk in a mile in my shoes.

RA