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Note that this is pure profit for Apple; they have zero costs in receiving this revenue! AT&T pays for the wireless network and its maintenance. Apple just gets the "royalty", so to speak. One hundred million dollars a year in gross profit.

The iPhone isn't revolutionary because of its form factor or UI. It's revolutionary because for the first time in the US a cell carrier is sharing monthly revenue with a phone manufacturer. That's never happened. And the rumors are that Verizon and T-Mobile rebuffed Apple over this very sharing. Which is why Apple partnered with AT&T.

It's the backend royalties where the big money is. Considering cell phones are kept for 2 years on average in the US, that means Apple makes at least $72 additional on every iPhone (this is $72 in PROFIT, not just revenue) that sticks on the AT&T network.

No, there's a huge incentive to keep the iPhones firmly in the grasp of AT&T...

Selling units as fast as they can make them is a failure? So far, they seem to have exceeded even their own projections...

According to whom??? They aren't selling units as fast as they can make them AC. I can go pick one up right now if I wanted a pretty paperweight. There are no back orders, they were in negotiations to cut production in half within a month of the debut, at two months they dropped the price by 33%, and they didn't hit a million units until 74 days after release on Sept 10th. Since 270,000 of those units were last quarter sales, they'll be lucky to hit a million units this quarter. By comparison, Nokia, in their most recent quarter, sold 1.5 Million units of their new and much more expensive N95 smartphones.

No precedent? In the USA, perhaps. No so elsewhere. Here's the report on the German case from not all that long ago. http://www.news.com/2100-7344-5198117.html

"At $200 I might have been able to scrape up enough to buy my oldest one for Xmas,but at $399? I could just buy a much more powerful Dell."

Actually you could. Walmart has 1.0 GHz VIA C3 laptops for $398 in stores or a 1.86 GHz Intel Celeron Acer Aspire for $428 with 14" LCD, 512meg, 80gig HD and dvd-rom/cdrw with Vista.

Walmart was selling $400 laptops way back in 2005, so to hear that someone's trying to sell a 433mhz, 1gig flash memory, 7.5" display laptop-sized device for $400 sounds a little nuts. Yes, I know half that is for charity, but I still pay $400 and get one laptop.

I'd like to how these companies and agencies react when hardware blueprints and software source code for their (very likely) proprietary products get subpoenaed by tech savvy defense lawyers. A reasonable court* would hold that a defendant has a right to examine the devices for his defense. Neither state secrets nor trade secrets will (given a reasonable court*) be a justification to hide the proprietary bits.

Since I expect neither the companies nor the government will be too keen on letting such material be examined in court, the combination of reasonable courts* and a tech savvy defense will greatly limit the applicability of this technology to law enforcement. Or, perhaps, people will realize that any hardware and software used by the government, particularly for law enforcement purposes, must be open public examination.

--sabre86

*Reasonable courts do exist, right? Please.

Adobe recently threatened to sue a company that wanted to include PDF output into their word processor.

Yes, that company was Microsoft, but that doesn't change the fact that they threatened to sue them over its inclusion for "antitrust reasons" (read: It would hurt the sales of Acrobat).

PDF isn't an open standard. If you want to implement it, Adobe apparently retains the right to sue you for it at any time.

According to CNET news 300 acres.

intel is also putting some effort into lower power x86 chips to compete with ARM in bulky handheld internet devices. As if ruining the desktop wasn't good enough :/

See here for the alternative reading of this situation.

Jobs does have incentive to lock the phones, but there's a sweet spot between letting the power users circumvent it, since it'll drive the hardware sales, and keeping people with AT&T, since Apple gets a cut from that too. It's likely not enough of a cut to make Apple furious about hacking, particularly for the number of people bothering to go through the trouble to change their service. It is still making 30% markup on the handsets, for heaven's sake! That's enough to buy Apple's inaction.

And meanwhile they're breaking records on sales volume, and the exclusive deals with the carriers slowly tick away. AT&T, O2 and T-Mobile got to sell an awesome phone that people are clearly interested in buying, but the phone is built in just such a way, it's just "smart" enough, as to make their lockin difficult to manage long-term.

After dealing with some of the shenanigans of RIAA, Apple must have found dealing with cellphone companies surprisingly easy. Thank ghod you can't use copyright law to enforce a cellphone service agreement ;)

Better articles w/ links:
News.com
The Guardian (Blog)
CNN Money
ZDNET

And also, actual Lotus Symphony page on IBM's site, with download link.

A server is a relly different beast than a desktop

No, it isn't IMO. It's all software that does the same things: open, read, mmap, copy, etc. Different software names, sure, and different workloads, but there's not so much difference. The kernel doesn't care if the process reading a file is apache or firefox, it just tries to read it fast. It's have been a long time since desktop was "stupid" software. Desktop software needs performance just as much as a server.

This (stupid) idea of splitting the kernel seems to come from people who thinks that the linux kernel is missing "optimization oportunities" from having a single kernel for all. Quite the contrary, i think we benefit from having it unified. Optimizations done to improve workloads for desktops usually _also_ benefit some server workload, and the reverse. And today's server hardware is tomorrow's desktop, so supporting well the servers means you work well tomorrow in the desktop. From the puristic design POV of many kernel hackers, they would tell you that a kernel that doesn't work for servers but does for desktops is broken and must be fixed. Of course, this is not always possible and there're also lots of config options to enable/disable particular functionality, but they aren't usually developed from the marketing POV of "this is for servers of desktops", but rather from a technological POV "when you run this workload, this feature improves the performance..." (like the sysctls at /proc/sys/*) or things like that.

Take for example, the real-time patchset. Other operative systems take real-time like something that only very few people dedicated to embedded devices use - they even don't care about it and leave that task to specialized real-time OSes. But in Linux, people developed a real-time patchset - they didn't though so much in what devices would use it, but rather in the technology. So, when the patchset was ready, Red Hat and Novell and others have launched server versions of a real-time. Now, those realtime server versions are happening to break latency records when serving transactions in Wall Street. This would have never happened if linux had different branches for embedded devices. In fact since most of the "other" operative systems are developed according to the needs of their company, and their company segments their way of working in "market segments", they've never though about trying to include realtime support in their operative systems.

So, please, let's leave "market segmentations" to red hat and novell, who can enable/disable extra features for specific market segments. Leave the kernel outside of that discussion, the kernel should only focus in technology. Me, as a geek, I might want to have a apache server being slashdotted and/or a FTP server running at the same time I play a 3D game. Just because the marketing teams think geeks are not worth of releasing a specific product optimized for me I shouldn't have good technology in my kernel to do whatever I want.

> Despite both the summary and the article, it's a real 3-core chip, designed that way from the ground up,
And you know it is because...????

It isn't just hothardware that is speculating it's a variant of Barcelonas.
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9780049-37.html

Personally, I think it's a good business choice for AMD.
It provides a number of benefits.
1> It generates some good press (At first I thought it was currently available from reading the article. It isn't. It's just being added to the roadmap for next year.)
2> They can get some utility out of the down-binned processors (ones that aren't able to get all 4 cores running at the specified speed, etc. for the quad-core, or that have a hard failure in one of the 4 cores)
3> They can use the product to hit price/performance points that they wouldn't hit otherwise (well, not without hurting their profits on quad-core) Possibly that may mean they even wind up with PhenomX3 parts that could have been quad-core, but just weren't tested on all 4 cores, as a test-time saving measure. Ex. Only test 3 cores, and if they're good, ship the part, cutting test time (and therefore production costs) by some amount. I believe Intel used this methodology on a number of Celeron parts - they had a huge volume of sales for Celerons because of price. I bet that for at least one of the versions of Celerons that was a downbinned Pentium at some point they said "Hey, we're only going to test these N wafers to see if they're good enough to be Celerons, so we can get more Celeron parts out the door faster"

> designed that way from the ground up
So what's the codename for the chip then? Not the marketting name.
Everyone has heard the codename of "Barcelona". And that's a quad-core chip.

What team of engineers worked on it / are working on it?
If you say it's the Barcelona team, I'd have to strongly disagree that it was a "ground up" design for 3 cores.

This is an interesting business strategy that plays to AMD's ability to sell partially-defective quad-core dies (confirmed by AMD in http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9780049-37.html). It should let AMD increase revenues per wafer, offer a nice mid-performance product, and play some product mix games with clocking -- selling a processor as either a higher speed triple-core or a lower-speed quadcore chip. And there's no reason why core count must be powers of two or even or anything.

Yet I can't help but wonder if customers will think twice about buying a 75% functional chip. It will be interesting to see how AMD spins this and how customers receive the product.

As of 2004:

"CEOs are increasingly aware of the risks posed to company information by insiders, but they aren't acting on this knowledge, according to the "2004 Ernst & Young Global Information Security Survey." More than 70 percent of the 1,233 organizations surveyed in 51 countries failed to list training and raising employee awareness of information security issues as a top initiative."

A case of 'ignorance is not bliss'.

CC.

Best Buy is already stocking Apple computers. In fact it's been stocking them since 2005.

The price differential is being blamed on raw materials costs and currency fluctuation.

This same subject - ad-supported Windows - was discussed back in 2005.

http://www.news.com/Microsoft+eyes+making+desktop+apps+free/2100-1014_3-5951569.html?tag=nefd.pop

I am not an M$ fanboy, but if they do intend to offer a free OS, then patenting the technology before offering the software to the marketplace is just a solid business plan.

They considered allowing the home versions of Vista to be permitted to run under virtualization, but they decided against it ultimately. Only business and ultimate versions of Vista may be legitimately run under virtualization. So Vista "can" run under virtualization, but you'll pay through the nose for the privilege and there is no technological reason why the cheaper versions couldn't.

I never said the monopoly itself was illegal. However I (and certain big and powerful judges) did say that it has illegaly abused its position to maintain and extend that monopoly .

http://www.news.com/2009-1001-232571.html

http://money.cnn.com/1999/11/05/technology/microsoft_finding/

But -thats what I said not in 5 years, Vista is not even here yet, not to mention most of the hardware for it , DVI/VGA are still standard video interfaces and none of DRM ridden interfaces are in main stream use (despite them being present on the market for last 5 years).

And then guess what? - non DRM ridden platform will still be here ,as there is still consumer demand for them .DRM ridden boxes will be just another appliance of limited use.

Remember you only need one hacked monitor and one hacked sound card in the whole world to get the content on the loose. -All regular users get it same no hassle way (bittorent,p2p).

"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Ring a bell? Some of us other nerds actually like listening to those nerds talking.

Oh and "Sharks with frickin' laser beams" is a quote from "Austin Powers", sorry but if you're a Nerd you should perhaps go watch that movie once more. It's a fun movie, and a fun scene.

On the other hand, if you're one of the stray non-Nerds that amble over here every once in a while sorry, please let me point you to the http://www.news.com/ door.

I completely agree with you in the sense that I'm terrified of the unfortunate new user interfaces that are waiting in the wings to be unleased. However, just because you can't personally envision a functional 3D environment that would be much easier and/or quicker to use than the current text based one browsers provide doesn't mean they don't exist. Those who think they can, however, are currently rounding up their venture capital. Big sites have been playing around with 2D interfaces, such as the Graphical What's Hot section used by news.com. And while I'm certain we'll see many more bad ideas like MS Bob, I also believe the net is already an immersive world in its current state, and adding the creamy 3D filing is far too lucrative for it not to eventually find functional footing.

... and did anybody notice after you visit the beta version of site, you are automatically pushed back to it whenever you try to go to the regular news.com? (try it with these links -- weird) Looks like some cookie magic. Looks like they want their readership to fall over to the new site. Considering this is /. it's more like a mass exodus to the beta version.

... and did anybody notice after you visit the beta version of site, you are automatically pushed back to it whenever you try to go to the regular news.com? (try it with these links -- weird) Looks like some cookie magic. Looks like they want their readership to fall over to the new site. Considering this is /. it's more like a mass exodus to the beta version.

You thinking having to give away for free, that which could have got your monopoly a shitload of revenue, lack of punishment?

it is a lack of punishment when Bill Gates himself has said this about piracy "... about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

It's pretty obvious he wants to get the schools and pupils addicted on this free software

" Or can I homebrew an OSX box?"

from an article on cnet:
"However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said."

According to this, Steve Jobs owns 10.1 million shares (that figure may be pre-split) of Apple, or 1.2% of those outstanding. 10 million of those are restricted shares granted to him by Apple. Mr. Jobs had sold off all but one of his shares he received from the Next merger soon after it happened.

So he's nowhere near a "majority" owner, and is only the second largest individual shareholder; at least 10 institutions control a bigger stake than Leader, aka Steve Jobs.

that China can compete with the U.S. Tech when we have the best Math and Science schools on the planet. I mean, there is so much interest within the U.S. to keep up innovation and not just be technology whores. Besides, we've patented everything anyway.

... based on press releases from last May, aren't Comcast's PVRs built on an MS platform?

Yep. Life is fair.

Of course with me, Mattel learned their lesson, as they didn't say a word about Mattelabuse.com or BarbieSLAPP.com.
But, they didn't learn their lesson before they were ordered to pay $1.8 million to a photographer that they sued for using the Barbie image.

CNET is reporting that a 3rd party developer has developed a 3rd party add-on available only in Japan (of course) that allows snitch cams to see through bikinis, thereby comverting them into fully-fuktional snatch cams

take a look at their SEC filing of June 9th. on Item 2 Title: MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION ... it sheds some light on where they think they are.

For what it's worth, if Microsoft really wanted to dominate this market:

Microsoft's cash holdings: 56.41B

Nintendo's market cap: 15.5B

Sony Corp's market cap: 33.57B

I generally dont spend a lot of time reading parodies, but this one was good. I highly recommend it *after* watching the Darl interview video, posted on news.com front page today. Look for it on the right side of the page.

Who's up first

Higly entertaining content.

Since when did a copyright infringement become a criminal offense?
A jury should definitely look at this. How would the RIAA do in court?

1)Consumers VS. RIAA: Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrus. Plaintiffs: anyone who bought a CD from the defendants from January,1, 1995-December 22, 2000.

Defendants: Capitol Records, EMI Music Distribution, Virgin Records America INC., Priority Records LLC, Time Warner LLC, Warner Music Group, Warner Bros Records, UMG Recrdings, Sony Entertainment, Musicland Stores Corp and Trans World Entertainment Group.

Ruling: Defandents agreed to pay a combination of cash and non-cash consideration. Cash Payments: 67,375,000. Prerecorded music compact discs distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be use for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products: 75,700,000.

2)Artist contracts: More and more artists are speaking out against unfair contracts, poor representation. Who can forget the battles with the Dixie Chicks and Sony and seeing Prince with the word "slave" written on his cheek. Then came the infamous symbol...
In the article Howard Berman a democratic senator who is trying to pass a bill to kill P2P piracy explains:

"Songwriters are the creators of their music we know and love. They pour their hearts and souls into their songs....they write because they love music. And some also dare to dream that their work will pay their bills. Each illegal peer-to-peer download of a song robs the songwrites of the 8 cents they are due under the mechanical license."
8 cents huh?

3) Government calling the shots: Mitch Bainwol, current CEO of the RIAA, began his career as a budget analyst in President Reagan's Office of Management and Budget and has variously served as a Senate staffer, as chief of staff for the Republican National Committee and as executive director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee. The RIAA spends 55 million a year on lobbying. Where is the consumer voice? Oh wait, it's in court being sued for 125 million...

Why on earth would I support an organization that justifies their actions with this logic....Howard Berman again: "P2P piracy does not promote legitimate sales, it replaces them. How do I know? I have some common sense, a grasp of fundamental economics, and a college-age daughter with lots of friends. Frankly, it is galling that creators must even respond to such laughable sophistry."

4) No data. Where is the data showing a loss in sales? Check their sites and you'll see the data is a projection of lost sales, not real numbers. That is why they are lobbying the government and using the media to spin propaganda about morality. For example, if I purchase a CD, I technically have a right to make a copy of it for myself so I can listen to it in the car, as I'm running, etc. The RIAA sees every useage as a sale, a full sale. I don't know anyone who would purchase 3 copies of the same CD! Their claims are completely unjustified and unsupported, not to mention unrealistic. Check the National Buyers studies and you'll see the inconsistency and disconnect between what the data actually says and what the RIAA claims.

If I knew the artist I liked were having problems with their contract, the music company I had supported had inflated prices from 1995-2000, government officials were being bribed to pass legislation not in my favor and that kids were being threatened with fines in the millions because they downloaded a song for free, wouldn't I go that extra mile to find alternative ways to acquire music?

A jury should definitely look into this one...

So, is Netscape (err... Gecko based browser) a part of it or what? I mean, does it use I.E. alone or does it ship with Netscape? News.com says, "...the Netscape service will be a significantly smaller file download...". So what does that mean?

If no Netscape, then how do we refer to the browser if we don't mean the ISP now? (Mozilla... :-P)

But seriously... What will become of Netscape.com? I mean logically it will become the portal site for the ISP...

On the other hand, if it ships with I.E. (or at least an I.E. preferences changer) then this might be the first instance of a company setting I.E. users homepages to Netscape.com...

I've always enjoyed a particular quirk in cnet/news.com that expires vulnerability stories about microsoft/windows products prematurely.

(Notice that the original page in each of the stories below can be seen, you've gotta keep your eye on it though.)

Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address - May 19, 2003
have allowed a good hacker both to read files stored on the Windows NT-based Internet

descriptions were taken from google, search for more keywords associated with worms/viruses/etc + windows and you'll end up with expired pages on news.com

Blame me for being paranoid, fuck it.

I've always enjoyed a particular quirk in cnet/news.com that expires vulnerability stories about microsoft/windows products prematurely.

(Notice that the original page in each of the stories below can be seen, you've gotta keep your eye on it though.)

Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address - May 19, 2003
have allowed a good hacker both to read files stored on the Windows NT-based Internet

descriptions were taken from google, search for more keywords associated with worms/viruses/etc + windows and you'll end up with expired pages on news.com

Blame me for being paranoid, fuck it.

when you don't have Microsoft ads plastered all over your page (like some people).

On the topic of MS ads on Slashdot: /. is a whore.

And doesn't work on the new G5s.

Microsoft is now confirming what was speculated: About 8:45pm PT Thursday, Microsoft.com and Windows Update went down for several hours. One reason was a DDOS attack Microsoft says was unrelated to the MSBlast worm.

And Microsoft sources also say the company has moved at least the Windows Update domain (and perhaps Microsoft.com itself) to new IP addresses isolated from the rest of their networks to blunt the expected worm attack.

Just in case others got misled by the general press reports: The MSBlast (and its two known variants) worm attack against WindowsUpdate.com will really start at 4 a.m. Pacific Friday (Redmond time). As noted in this News.com piece the widely-reported "midnight" is really "when a PC clock shows midnight" -- whenever Friday becomes Saturday, starting across the International Date Line in Anadyr, Russia. Set your TiVos accordingly, assuming you have power.

CNet writers and editors: don't bother writing yet another biased article about this one, I saved you the trouble! Article follows:

Over the hot debate over whether or not Linux can steal SCO (SCOX)'s IP, in a childish move, developers of GCC threaten to pull SCO support unless SCO withdraws its lawsuit. A Microsoft (MSFT) representative was quoted as saying, "Our customers can count on us to provide consistant support for all the platforms we currently support in our compilers. Additionally, Windows Server 2003 provides a consistant and robust solution for all your server needs. Buy Office XP today too." /. readers: sorry, venting some frustration here

So, yes, the engineering grunts are having a hard time. Read "Will code for food" by C|Net. The CEO of Google and the CIO of FedEx are living incredibly well on their million-dollar salaries, but the grunt American engineer is not doing well at all. There's mortgage payments, clothes for the kids, insurance bills, etc. The high-tech sector of the overall American economy is going through its worst recession in almost 3 decades.

No. We don't need any more H-1B workers.

I don't understand what the big deal is. If the Chinese want to use Google, they will. If they want to use the new Government organized search engine, they will. The one that acquires most users wins. Open competition at its best. You should cheer competition in the marketplace.

Unless, of course, the Chinese governments artificially changes the odds by blocking Google or Google's Chinese partner. That may or may not happen. To my knowledge they are not blocking Google at the moment.

The article points out that AIX is handled by the Server group at IBM, not the software group. So while this Mills guy says exciting things, he isn't necessarily the guy to make that decision.

Excellent point. Anybody who actually read the article (and it's been up on News.com's website for a couple of days now) knows that IBM's AIX folks are surprised to hear that AIX's days are apparently numbered.

Basically, the article quotes one guy from IBM as saying that he foresees the day when Linux will replace AIX in IBM's lineup. The odds are that he's right simply because it costs so much to develop a Unix and keep it current, and IBM wants to be able to have you scale up from a low-end Intel box to a Z-series mainframe with any stop in between and take your software with you. Linux is the one OS that runs on all of IBM's hardware.

But that said, it'll be awhile and the AIX guys won't go quietly. They'll probably have some kind of AIX-compatibility libraries that they'll license to their customers the way SCO is planning to do with their libraries. IBM may also port their AIX management tools to Linux and license those separately, as well. Who knows what the future will hold, but it's likely that Linux will simply absorb AIX's capabilities in IBM's product lineup at some point. This means that even if AIX goes away, it won't really go away--it'll just change shape.

One last point. As someone pointed out in the article, "IBM has never decommissioned an operating system, and they're not about to start now."

Don't you hate news stories where almost every damn word is a link ?