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I find this offering by Garmin to be superior to other combination PDA and fill-in-the-blank-with-MP3-Player-or-cell-phone-or -digital-camera.

It is particularly applicable for mobile professionals who often find themselves in unfamiliar cities. The high level sales executives where I work immediately come to mind. No they aren't stupid, they just often find themselves having to get to a certain downtown meeting in a city they have been to many times visiting different clients and I am sure it would be nice to have a mobile GPS integrated with the PDA they already carry anyway. Plus it is sleek and stylish enough that even the women in the power suits would pull it out of their purse at a meeting.

I believe that in the Lindows suit Microsoft essentially lost their trademark on "Windows" as being too generic.

But debate continues about what PC users can and can't do with digital media, prompting ongoing courtroom battles and proposed new laws. With new technologies like copy-protected PCs in the offing, even folks who happily pay for movies and music have voiced concerns that they could end up unable to rip songs to a PC or transfer them to an MP3 player.

Some people maintain such activities fall under the copyright law's fair use clause, but Frackman believes that isn't true: "Fair use has become a real buzzword, but it's a phrase that's often misused. [It] grew up to permit people to do things like criticism or scholarship.a?| In my view, it was never intended to permit copying of copyrighted material for purposes of just making a copy or moving it to a hard drive."

In other words, the RIAA really doesn't want anyone to copy usic, even if it's from independant artists, even if it's from old analog sources like a record, cassette, or 8-track. To the RIAA, if you want to listen to it, play it on it's original media and equipment, and your equipment and can't replace the media, if you media fails, or if you would just like to listen to it on your4 cd player, then purchase it on CD, if you can't then tough luck. In a few years, I woudn't doubt it if they go after companies Like Ahead Soft, Roxio, Goldwave, Syntrillium, etc, for writing software that allows people to copy music from any source.

According to this article from PCWorld Microsoft has agreed to pay for its customers' full legal bills if they get sued over intellectual property issues relating to its products.

My bet is that Microsoft agreed to that as a statement in the SCO battle. I'm wondering if they may soon be regretting that.

According to this article from PCWorld Microsoft has agreed to pay for its customers' full legal bills if they get sued over intellectual property issues relating to its products.

My bet is that Microsoft agreed to that as a statement in the SCO battle. I'm wondering if they may soon be regretting that.

Check out PCWorld's running Top 10 Color Laser Printers list.

I've got a 1.6 Ghz Intel Pentium-M (centrino is a marketing gimmick. It is the chipset, processor, and wireless LAN module not the processor). The processor is as fast as a 2.4 Ghz Pentium chip in every benchmark I can run. Centrino may be a gimmick but the Pentium-M processor delivers real performance and allows for decent battery life too.

The parent is flaimbait. Why is it modded "Insightful"? Could it be because it is anti M$? /.'s double standard is showing. In other news, PCWorld.com sites Mozilla in its "Best of 2003" feature... "The browser wars may be over, but browser innovation isn't. For five years, the open-source community has hacked away on Mozilla, a free program that is now stable, speedy, standards-compliant, and full of useful features. Unlike Internet Explorer, Mozilla blocks pop-ups with a built-in tool, manages cookies and passwords site-by-site, and includes both an IRC chat client and a powerful mail reader with intelligent spam filtering. You can surf multiple sites in one tabbed browser window (as you can in Opera, another alternative Web browser we like)."

in PCWorld.

The camera can take 640x480 shots even though they don't fit on the screen. And has "movie recorder" software, I'd like specs on its movie recording capability. If it can take 320x240 MPEGs at 30fps I'm buying one as soon as they are released. If its some weird file format, or less than 20 fps, or not at least 320x240 I'll wait and buy a real digital movie camera instead.

Also it has USB and infrared ports of course.

There's an upcoming model from Iomega which will be the first burner that handles all three standards.

as the original author of worldpad (a program that does EXACTLY THE SAME THING as what microsofts 'patent' claims to do) I can stand up and claim 'prior art' to this system. ic-crypt.com(the download link url to worldpad) is dead because I'm no-longer maintaining that software or services (I've moved onto bigger and better things). But this begs me to ask the question : do these monkey's at the UPTSO actually bother to check AT ALL for prior art? or do they just see a big name like "Microsoft" and take their word for it? (who cares as long as the cash comes in right?) The US Patent and Trademark System is so stupidly broken and corrupted it's unreal.

Then, this fake Ink crap must be your alka seltzer in ginger ale

Could the army save a ton of money if they used OSS? Yes. But while the Army is in many ways like a business, it isn't a business. One disadvantage that the Army has is that it can't attract the necessary personnel within itself to maintain a large Linux network. This is a misconception, though. All the money that they saved could have been diverted to services and maintenance had they wished.

Some people here have raised the spectre of cost, accountability, and reliability of maintenance. But how much will the Army pay for support of 400,000+ computers? As for accountability and reliability, I would think that a company like IBM is more than up to the challenge of maintaining this network.

Security-wise we all know this might be disastrous. Not only is it going to be desktops but servers as well. Like I said, on the surface it seemed like a good deal.

Slate ponders projections that Linux PCs will pass Apple in desktop market share next year.

That's what the article is about. Not which is better. Not which has better software.

How about some figures.

Wednesday 30th April 2003
"Apple's worldwide market share is about a paltry 2 percent, according to IDC."

Friday, September 06, 2002
"According to Gartner Dataquest, Apple's worldwide market share was 2.5 percent last year[2001]"

Is it difficult to believe that Linux will achieve >2% penetration into the worldwide desktop market by next year?

Considering that Wal-Mart is selling Linux PC's for $199 and it is the OS of choice in developing countries trying to run a modern desktop OS on legacy hardware it does not seem to be that much of a stretch.

Remember, Universal is a part of the IDSA as well, not just because of Blizzard, but Universal themselves made 31 Coin-Op Games in the 1980s. and we all know how lawsuit happy Universal is.

"Universal vs Nintendo & Coleco"
"Universal vs. Sony"
"Universal vs MP3.COM"
And the list goes on and on.

Read the part labeled Goals Aceived
A pcworld Article

That's not always true. Sometimes patches are the problem.

Almost without fail, hacking incidents at major companies are found to be due to security holes that have been known about and fixed for months, if not years.

Tell that to the victims of the latest BugBear worm. Admins who patched for the first worm were not protected against the latest variant.

Dear SCO employee,

So, when SCO sues Microsoft over DR-DOS (and wins)

wrong. Caldera didn't win - they settled.

But when they have a more substantial claim against IBM and Linux

wrong again. There's no evidence their claims are any more substantial. In fact, there's evidence that there isn't much of a case behind their lawsuit.

Thanks for playing! Bye!

It may be unfair to single out IBM, though You are right there was a class action suit info however one should remember that they had an CEO (very prominent, he began an extraordinary career at IBM in 1949 and he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and being in the Bilderberg Group)who was as far away from beeing a nazi as you can get. Or was that later??...hmm yeah -81, just in time to get gates to deliver an OS(google webcache-only the cache is alive) as it says at the harvard site, they key person was Mr Opel, who was a friend of Mrs Gates. See? Networking networking networking.That should teach you to socialize more, dont sit in front of that smelly keyboard! Where was I? Right, IBM are our friends nowdays :)

While I'm not a fan of PalmOS for my PDA, I think the PalmOS would make a better platform for programming games than do most consoles. I mean, if Sony wants me to spend $200 on a portable console, it better be pretty damn powerful- a lot more than my GBA. There's no reason you couldn't have a 100-200 MHz ARM-based PDA and gaming machine that went for $200, with a decent dpad/button configuration.

After all, that other company is doing it with the Helix. I don't think they've released the specs on the POS device they will be using, but never fear- if they pull it off, you will have a combo PalmOS/Gaming device eventually. But Sony could pull it off- and they'd have a much higher chance of succeeding than this new outfit making the Helix.

This kind of destroys Microsoft's way of thinking but I guess I'll believe it when I see it.

Believe it or not, Microsoft is not the bad guy in this case. AOL has been blocking MSN users for years: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,11968,00 .asp

Here is a mirror!

Actually, we game developers care. We want to make use of new features of graphics cards to increase performance and/or visual quality. But also, we want our games to run on all (relatively-recent) cards, without having to write complex hacks to work around the bugs of each one.

It's no use benchmarking on the latest and greatest games -- because, as developers, we try and avoid releasing games that run horribly (slowly or with obvious bugs) on certain cards. Sometimes we can persuade the manufacturers to fix their bugs, but the timescales can be tight and soemtimes they're quite happy to not fix the bugs, especially if they know their competition runs the codepath you're looking at faster than them, and we get forced to drop the feature. So instead of games pushing up hardware quality, games are held back by shoddy hardware or (more usually) drivers. You're just benchmarking on what the manufacturers already know works. Zzzz. Futuremark's job is to stress-test in advance what's coming up.

And even if Futuremark does things that aren't always what you'd do in games, they are trying to push the cards to the limits to see if they do what the manufacturers claim, or whether they only achieve their claimed performance "in controlled tests".

So some of us talk to the Futuremark guys and say things like, "We're looking into using [technology X] in our next game, but the drivers on cards [A and B] are screwed, works on [C] though. Could you put a section into 3DMark 2004 that uses [X]?". Then, when their card performs miserably at [X] (even though the card's hardware can handle it -- it's just that they've been slack on the drivers) they get shamed into improving their quality at those features. A bit like WHQL for games.

Once the driver bugs for the features are fixed, we can write code that uses them.

Except NVidia decided to stop playing nice when it turned out the latest tests make their cards look quite poor, and noticeably slower than ATI's. So they took their ball and went home (dropped out of Futuremark's beta programme). This is why they didn't know their cheating would be discovered.

And of course, this problem is compounded by people like yourself, Mr Sonic, who see big numbers in Quake benchmarks (you do realise 3D card mfgs "optimise" those too, right?), pop wood, and rush off to buy the latest hovercraft no matter if it's not really "all that".

Incidentally, ATI's optimisations were exactly that: optimisations. Essentially, they were reordering instructions in a shader -- exactly like a compiler optimising instruction order for Intel or AMD processors' particular quirks. The meaning and, more importantly, on-screen output of the code was not altered.

Whereas it's clear to see from the screenshots in the original expose article, that NVidia were not optimising, but actually not running code, causing the onscreen output to look wrong. As developers, we don't want gamers returning our games to the shops "because it goes wrong when you do X". Nor do we want to sweat blood trying to invent ways to avoid their driver bugs.

Oh... someone else who cares about 3DMarks? OEMs. When it comes around to picking what cards to put inside big-name off-the-shelf PCs or, eventually, which chips to surface-mount on the all-in-one motherboard, they're looking for price-performance, and 3DMark is a part of that equation.

I had understood that interix included far more than gcc, essentially that it includes cygwin and all the gnu tools. I went ahead and started my own google, and I did find several articles from the various Microsoft shills (like PC World) which focused mainly on the fact Microsoft was using GPL products while decrying the GPL, and which claimed that they did provide source code to gcc.

I also found this sourceforge site which chronicles efforts to uncover undocumented microsoft sites that provide GPL software. There is some interix stuff here, but it seems very much incomplete. Not satisfied, I decided to go for the horse's mouth (or is it really the mouth? :)) and found it is much as I originally stated.

For starters:

The software development kit (SDK) included with Interix 2.2, makes it easy to migrate existing UNIX-based applications to the Interix environment. It supports over 1900 UNIX application programming interfaces (APIs), and its tools include make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, gcc, g++, and g77 comilers.

You will notice none of that is included in the files at the site I mentioned. Also there is another Microsoft Interix Site which expands on this:

New Interix Integration

The key difference between Windows Services for UNIX 2.0 and 3.0 is that now Microsoft Interix is fully integrated into Windows Services for UNIX 3.0. The Interix subsystem technology provides a universal environment in which to run both Windows and UNIX applications on a single system. That means you can reduce development time while leveraging existing employee skills sets.

The Interix technology provides a UNIX environment that runs on top the Windows kernel, enabling UNIX application and scripts to run natively on the Windows platform alongside Windows applications. With this capability, you can continue to get value out of your UNIX scripts and applications--simply reuse them on Windows.

Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 also includes more than 300 UNIX utilities and tools that behave exactly as they would on UNIX systems, plus a software development kit (SDK) that supports over 1900 UNIX APIs and migration tools such as make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.

Anyway, as I said, long ago the FSF bitched about this, and there was a slashdot article with attendant brouhaha, but ultimately afaict the Microsoft answer of downloading sources from the FSF (despite the possibility and likelihood Microsoft changed things before compiling the versions they have distributed) seems to have stood. Even the site I linked which has some source files is unofficial and undocumented anywhere but the sourceforge site I also linked.

After hunting around on Microsoft's site, I did find this page which does have two links to download some source code and an offer to sell a cd for $20. However, again, even the claimed list of utilities to which source code is supposed to be available is lacking, (Microsoft says they are using 300 gnu tools and there is far less there) and the one link that works (the other does not) appears once again to point to a far-from-all-inclusive source of sources.

Of course I have no interest in Microsoft's products, it just annoys me that they can violate the GPL and BSD licenses repeatedly and nothing ever really happens to them.

You ought to work tech support some time. There are real costs associated with software bugs.

Real but small. Having worked both support and development, I also know that there are real costs to fixing bugs- especially in a product that's already released.

One entire day of downtime from Melissa was a very "real cost". It sure didn't hurt the market share of Microsoft's emailers in the corporate world though, which is why they were able to get another entire day of downtime one year later from Code Red.

This code freeze lasted for SIX MONTHS. That's a HUGE risk for a software company

That would've been a "HUGE risk", if it had happened. 1 It also undermines any arguments based on "customers are lemmings that will buy anything we dangle in front of them".

That's a strawman. The actual argument is that "customers will accept many crashes in their software", and it has been empirically demonstrated by the large number of crashes still occuring in recent software. (Microsoft and Apple's desktops still crash frequently enough that it's no surprise. Redhat's does as well).

It seems well accepted that Win2k was more stable than WinXP. That sure looks like a case of more features (to drive a big round of upgrades) outweighing stability.

when I work with a senior admin within the organization, I find they are the "NO" people.

Senior admins are a small minority of software customers.

The palm folks laughed but look at palms stock price now? It was $.80 a share the last time I looked! MS took over 75% of the market in less then 2 years!

According to this article from Gartner it's more like:
PalmOs: 55.2%
Windows CE (sic): 25.7%
That's as of January.

PC World has similar numbers:
PalmOS: 48.6%
Pocket PC: 30%
That's as of October.

What was your source of info again? And did you wash afterwards? ;-)

-chris

is anyone else worried about how IBM, makers of some not-so-reliable drives of late, is making this? I sure don't want real evidence being destroyed because of a hard drive crash.

"The first technology--a prototype developed by IBM Research--is the Meta Pad, a 3-by-5-inch, 9-ounce device that an IBM official hailed as the "ultimate personal server." The Meta Pad contains an 800-MHz chip, a 10GB hard drive, a 3D graphics chip, and 128MB of memory; it is capable of running Windows XP.

The device, which supports Bluetooth, is designed to help give users access to all their data whether they are connected to their desktops or laptops, via a docking station or wirelessly over the Internet. "

for one thing you can check the AppDB at wine first to see if it runs (or transgaming)... then you can go out an buy it. and who wants a game console that you can only set up on one tv and if you change tvs you have to tell the console makers for permission

. sounds like a blast! where can i get my "game console" so i can begin raping my computer ;p

It's called a hat switch. It's on lots of nice joysticks to control the direction you're looking. I've been after one to be put on a good mouse forever. If Logitech would put one on one of their corded MX models, I'd be in heaven.

There is definitely prior art. Take a look at the mouse component of this Saitek mouse/action pad bundle.

eBay is also being targetted by the same complaints and investigation.

I'd recommend ASFRecorder when it works. That file includes a Win32 binary and the .c source which can be compiled thusly:

gcc asfrecorder.c -o asfrecorder

And then just:

asfrecorder http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/underworld/vide o/trailer/trailer_high.asx

With mplayer it isn't quite as easy to capture streamed data:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile underworld_teaser_trailer_high.asf mms://agency2wm.fplive.net/agency/2/2/film/underwo rld/underworld_teaser_trailer_high.asf

Of course, if you're using mplayer/xine, you might find the Quicktime version a bit better:

wget http://a772.g.akamai.net/5/772/51/1373e4e8b18d05/1 a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d80d3cb12453c02 589f25382f668c9329e0375e8178af967e03faf187bef64d63 baedd52c02489fb72e153bf23/underworld_m480.mov/a?

Anyone have any idea how many of these backlogged patents are stupid attempts to cash-in on common ideas?

Like this patent on linking...

or this patent on floating banners...

Dude, do you have a Dell? :)

I submitted a PCWorld story on the 10th and 11th about AOL applying to the FCC for release from the requirement to make AOL Instant Messener interoperable with other provider's services.

The story that was posted on the 12th was about tests of Video Messaging.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110158,t k,dn040703X,00.asp

:-)

Sony already has a shipping blu-ray unit. Granted, it's only available in Japan, but thta's what your local neighborhood import shop is for... This is just a list of specs and pictures... Check out all those inputs!

Um, Microsoft has had a 64-bit OS since 1991, and they have been shipping the 64-bin Windows Server 2003 for months now.

I just received a link to this PCWorld article which says they are paying Universities to teach students how to hack into software, supposedly to learn how to "fix" design flaws!

Which is it going to be?

Lets all give them much respect.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109857,t k,dn031803X,00.asp

AC

The power consumption of AMD's mobile processor is still much much higher than Intel's. Tom's Hardware says here that the power-saving features of the Pentium M are supposed to ensure that Pentium-M has an "average power consumption" of less than 1 W, while still delivering satisfying performance. PCWorld corroborates that here stating that the 1.3-GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.5-GHz, and 1.6-GHz Pentium M chips draw an average of less than 1 watt of power.

Compare that to the advertized draw of AMD's low-voltage chips including the 1800+, 1700+, 1600+, 1500+, and 1400+ models which dissipate 25 watts when operating at maximum power. If that's the maximum draw, the average is not likely to be less than 10..

The caveat is that the other laptop conponents, most notably the backlit display, consume the lion's share of the battery life anyway. Lord knows I support the underdog (I even bought a Cyrix instead of an original Pentium), but this Centrino chip is good.. damn good.

links:

http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=2003030 7003
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109730,0 0.asp

To date, Sony has only talked in vague terms about Blu-ray recorders becoming available in 2003 and an April launch is a surprise, not only because Sony had given no hints that it was close to a commercial product but also because high-definition broadcasting, for which it was designed, has yet to take hold in Japan or anywhere else in the world. The BDZ-S77 has a built-in tuner for Japan's direct-to-home satellite broadcasting service which carries a high definition channel.

Sony has no plans to launch the recorder overseas, Yanagisawa said.

www.stolemy.com Found at a PC world news. here. Hum, thought ppl might find this uswful/interesting. (most likely this has been posted before me... but there are like 5 million posts, gaaaah! Forgive me)

All these cellphone things remind me of the extra episode of the anime "Platonic Chain." This series is made up about little weird snippets of the modern consumer tech world just a little bit into the future.

In "Platonic Chain Web," the extra episode (not exactly part of the series ... I don't know if it's a promo or what), people with video cellphones (kind of like this one, sent to a website) go around the city video blogging their daily lives. And guys who consider themselves players video themselves picking up chicks.

It's the wave of the future.

I think that's why "less than one percent" of their call volume is in relation to bugs. It's because MS insists that they're features. Just like the one in Word 97, 2000, and 2002 which "could permit a clever cracker to steal copies of files on your hard drive."

So this must mean that over 99% of their call volume is in regard to "features." Yeah, that's it!

A PCWorld interview is here

He is also cited as the discoverer of several MS vulnerabilities by Microsoft themselves:

here
here
and
here
...but they keep getting modded down as flamebait or offtopic. *sigh*

I'm not a Mac apologist. I have nothing against Windows in general (beyond the Microsoft business practices), and if a Windows machine ever appeals to me more than a Mac I won't hesitate to switch over. But, as of right now, I am very satisfied with OS 10.2 (on the same machine as your desktop, actually), and this kind of unjustified bashing needs correcting. Some of your statements do have a basis in fact, but the rest just smack of bitterness. ;-)

- Hardware is still ~40% more than similar PC stuff.

On desktops, probably. Laptops, no.

- Dependablity has dropped to "white box" levels.

This one I haven't seen. Look here. I'm guessing you're the only person who thinks that.

- iMoive et all applications cost $100 per year (to stay up to date)

iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto are all completely free, unless you feel like paying for a CD to be shipped to you. iDVD costs, last I checked, $49, but that's only for computers that ship with an Apple SuperDrive. I don't know where that's coming from.

- blah@mac.com accounts cost $130 per year PER ACCOUNT PER YEAR.

Um ... It's $99. I think there's a discount or something if you buy a new computer, but I'm not definite. And of course, no one is forcing you to use .Mac. I have a Mac, and I haven't used .Mac since they started charging for it, and it hasn't exactly been a deal-killer.

$360 per year for the feeding of a Mac is IMO too much. I resently bought a Toshiba 1115-S103 laptop (1.5Ghz Cel, 20G HD, 256M RAM, WinXP Home and a 14" screen) for $750 (new after $200 rebate). A similar iBook would be $1540 ($1050 + $130 + $360) over two years as opposed to my Toshiba for $900 ($750 + $150 for possible OS update costs).

You can redo the math yourself, but look what you got -- that Toshiba laptop has a Celeron, weighs 7 pounds, and has 2 hours of battery life. You've already considered the OS, so I won't rant about that. If that extra couple hundred dollars is worth it for you, go ahead. I won't dispute your opinion, but your facts could use some help. Sorry for ranting a little (OK, a lot), but unsupported bashing really has no place in a supposedly neutral discussion. :-)

-- shayborg

Thank you very much for your insightful comments (a rarity on slashdot) Perhaps you can shed some light on why then Transmeta is producing a 256 bit chip. Is this just a trick to save electricity?