Slashdot Mirror

I was initially going to link to this or this article, but the first included this memorable quote:

We like to think of most corporations as hard candies with a soft chewy center," Rouland said.

Mmmmmm... Soft, chewy center...

I was somewhat surprised not to see this article posted to /. regarding the court's decision against Mircosoft not including Java in Windows XP.

The irony approaches LD50 concentrations. Toss a Deskstar off a 3-storey building onto macadam and it'll keep working like Grandpa's Timex, but leave it in the comfort and stability of your computer's case and it'll self-destruct like Jim Phelps' tape recorder.

Ah, well, back on-topic. We in the US military know about remanence security. (I think institutional paranoia is closer to the truth, but at least for once it works to our benefit.) The default behavior in our illustrious organization is "purge it completely (NSA-grade multiple overwrites) before it leaves your office."

You can buy used US hardware (commercial-off-the-shelf-stuff, o' course) at auction, and it's really unlikely you'll find anything on the hard drive. Not even an OS, let alone someone's performance rating or sensitive Powerpoint slides.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,108786,0 0.asp

Would you buy a watch from these guys?

(Sorry for the mistype before. :-) )

Here are some references:

NewsFactor Network

PC World

Actually, just go to Google and do a search on this. According to Mr.G his testimony says that you can not separate Windows from the OS and that is why MS could not allow third party software to have a way to change things. Now (remember the current testimony is from last week and not several years ago) that Windows is separate from the OS which is why it should have unique standing for trademark purposes. This contradicts his earlier testimony and makes this testimony perjury. Because he is changing his story on what Windows really is. Which is to say it is nothing more than a glorified GUI stuck on top of an OS just like X Windows is to Unix.

The truth is - you can't have it both ways. It either is or it is not an integral part of the OS. So Lindows should pick this up and run with it. Just like the remaining states should pick this up and run with it. It is the proof they both need that MS is willing to say (and probably do) whatever it takes in order to win a court battle.

Here are some other useful SL-C700 links I've found in the last week or so:

MobileNews article with LOTSA pix (in Japanese, but the pix are easy to see).

Here is a mobigeeks blurb (with several off-links to other interesting places, also a forum).

About a quarter of the way down this page, there are some good closeup pix.

Here is an nvmax.com article, describing Dynamism's efforts, and several other off-links.

Here is Sharp's own page, also in Japanese, but has a couple of decent pix.

Here's a German article, with a good description of the specs.

Enjoy

It's called industry intelligence my moronic friend (backed by stats like this). Already Toshiba had captured virtually all of the presses hearts with the e series (because suddenly Pocket PCs weren't the "too-large" devices they had been), and now Dell has captured the hearts and minds of even more by offering sub-Palm pricing on far more powerful devices. Perhaps you're sitting in Palm headquarters fervently pretending that you're under no risk, but rest assured that sitting on your laurels for several years wasn't too wise.

As a sidenote, I find it absolutely hilarious that you try to pretend that I karma whored...in a post where I SAID SOMETHING PRO-MICROSOFT (or as another poster stated, I'm a "Microsoft fanboy"). Maybe you're near hear, but it's pretty much the opposite, and that usually ensures moderation obliteration. Indeed, I know that it's only a matter of time before some anti-Microsoft fanatics come in and stomp my post to -1, and I would honestly be disappointed if it didn't happen.

Palm, Handspring and Sony control 81.1% of the market. Compaq, Casio, and Dell (newcomer) combined, control 12.6% of the market.

Firstly, Dell's PDAs just came out and lowered the bar to even or lower than Palms (for a much, much more feature rich system). Secondly, your numbers are a tad out of date (not really that surprizing). Here we can see that PocketPC currently has 30% of all sales (the "market", if you will), versus compared to 48% for Palm. A tad different from your numbers. This was before Dell virtually halved the price of a PocketPC PDA.

Secondly, the "bloated and more expensive" is an outdated argument as well. Firstly something like the Toshiba e310 or e740 represent among the smallest PDAs available, yet they offer tremendous power. Dell's new PDAs, starting at $199, offer incredible value. And what's with the "proprietary" nonsense, Palm fanboy? And Palm ISN'T? Oh, right, proprietary=Microsoft in Slashdot speak.

Most normal folks still aren't keen on this whole digital lifestyle thing. My dad is pining for a single device that lets him control music and video easily, and he won't even do that until its simple and elegant unlike the kludgy PC video capture stuff out there for free. Tivo has the best PVR sheduling features out there, and adding an easy way for joe consumer to get his music and pictures from his pc to his entertainment center (which is where he really wants to enjoy these things in the first place) may just be the extra value that people need to warm up to this whole set-top digital hub concept. outside of us geeks, few have so far.

But charging extra for these features can't last for long. Tivo has the best scheduling features and I love my DirecTivo, but the gap is closing, and many others are starting to offer devices that provide PC power that can be controlled from the couch with a remote control. Microsoft is pushing its Media Center, but the real device that may finally hit it big is the Moxi Media Center. This box does the tv recording and music and photo streaming from a pc as well, and apparently does it elegantly as it was widely considered the best of show at last year's CES. Most importantly, Charter Cable will soon be rolling out this box to tons of subscribers next year, normal folks who would NEVER seek out let alone pay extra for an all-in-one media box, but will likely fall in love with it after the cable guy installs it. This type of functionality is coming fast from many angles and I for one am quite excited about it. I love my Tivo, but if they try to charge too much for the features, the masses will eventually have all this stuff handed to them trojan-horse style. Pioneers often get arrows in their backs...

Their products are fluff. The Wi-Fi adapter for the Palm (Xircom PWE 1130) rocks. It integrates seamlessly with any m-series Palm and has it's own power source---plus requires no software installation. The thing doesn't even come with a CD! You actually have a *choice* with Palm browsers as well, and most of them seem dedicated to solving the screen width problem (whereas Pocket IE ignores it). And review after review after review says that DocumentsToGo does a BETTER job of handling Microsoft Office documents than the Pocket PC applications made by Microsoft themselves!

Palm is behind in one area: multimedia. Palm has never felt handhelds have the battery power to be effective here until recently. We'll see if they can catch up in the coming year with Palm OS 5 and OS 6.

To break Wine, they need to break backwards compatibility. Their existing MASSIVE market of users and companies that use old programs on new Windows will prevent them from ever doing this like you say.

Right. Breaking backwards compatibility is a bad thing. They couldn't, for example, just wake up one day and decide that the new version of MS Office will run on Windows XP and Windows 2000SP3, but not on earlier Windows 2000 releases, nor on Windows XP or Windows 95/98/ME. API backwards compatibility is there for a reason, right?

Maaaayyyyybe, they're just running an old version of this with this.

Well, you never know...

I'd rather have this.

Not only that, but you get some really great tech support.

I'm going to be honest here, up front, I work for Apple as a Tech Support agent in one of their call centers. That being said, I hope that doesn't affect how people interpret my post.

I'm sure most of the Slashdot crowd are smart enough to figure out their own problems, but if Tech Support is a deciding factor in purchasing any type of system, I'd like to point out some interesting facts...

For the last two years, Consumer Reports has rated Apple Computers #1 in terms of Service and Support. The latest report can be found here (I hope that link works). Apple beat Dell by a significant margin, not to shabby.

Also, a recent reader survey by PC World, found here, listed Apple with the best Tech Support marks among PC suppliers. I'll put in the stipulation that I'm not sure what percentage of PC World's readers are Mac users, but I found the survey results relevant and ironic.

Now, if you want to talk about the price on an Apple laptop versus a PC laptop, discounting the hardware specs that everyone seems to focus on during these discussions, I'd like to point out that a Powerbook or an iBook similarly configured to some Dell laptop still has an edge in the software department. Out of the box, all Apple computers come with the "iApps" as well as AppleWorks, and some other third party applications. That may not be of interest to everyone, but to a lot of consumers, being able to make your own movie and such and then burn it to DVD, virtually seamlessly, all with a consistant and easy-to-understand interface... that's a big selling point to some, and as I stated earlier, all Apple computers ship with this software (well, iDVD only ships with SuperDrive enabled Macs, but that should make sense). Value is not determined wholy by hardware alone, and Apple has a really great total package.

Well, I think I may have probably spent more time rambling than I should have, but to add a little more info about myself so I don't sound like a total Mac Evangelist... I've been using PCs for more than half my life, and I used to be a Mac-basher, but I was lured by Mac OS X and the pretty PowerBook, and I have not looked back since making the "switch." Oh yeah, obviously I'm partial to Apple Tech Support since I work for them, but then again, why not be proud of doing a good job... right?

I just can't help but wonder why everyone seems to be so excited about Macs. If you ever want to run the latest game on that "other" OS, you can't really do it on Mac without paying a premium and/or having to wait forever for it to come out. And not just games, but other software too.

Lamentably, games are indeed one of the big areas of lag. Even so, there are plenty of games out there for the Mac - far more than any normal person could find time to play. How many games do you need? The delay associated with some games (not all - there are some simultaneous releases, and even a tiny number of Mac-firsts) can be a drag at times, but it also has silver linings - sometimes our first release of a game is of the "gold edition" with extra maps and whatnot, so people who buy the game right away still get all the extra trimmings without paying extra or rebuying the game down the road; also, sometimes the initial PC releases are deeply bug-ridden, but by the time they make it to us the bugs have been squashed. Neither of these is a reason to game on the Mac, to be sure, but they do at least illustrate it's not all bad. For what it's worth, I can personally attest that the Mac gaming scene is substantial enough to be satisfying. Others do disagree, but I think the worst problem with the Mac gaming scene is that certain specific genres of games (like sports games, which I don't play but I'm aware many love) are sorely underrepresented. Unless you're into a type of game that isn't well-represented on the Mac, though, I think you can find your gaming fix here.

As for other software, pretty much every kind of thing you'd want to do with a computer can be done on a Mac, and frequently with the same software you'd use on a Wintel machine. There are even lots of Mac-only releases, and there are plenty of general tasks that are almost certainly easier on the Mac than on any PC (DVD authoring, for example).

Dell has a comparable deal [dell.com] that is $999 for an Inspiron 2650, comes with a free hard drive upgrade and a CD-burner (or DVD) upgrade. Not only that, but you get some really great tech support. And no, I don't work for dell. I just can't understand what all this jazz about getting an Apple is.

Well, it's certainly true that despite Apple's best efforts there is a price delta between Macs and PCs, and one can usually get a PC for less money than a Mac of identical or near-identical specs, but that gap is probably narrower than one would think, and many of us feel it's justified by the ease-of-use alone, not to mention other arguments I'll mention at the end of this post. You also mention tech support; for what it's worth, some would argue Apple's support beats Dell's, and most other vendors' for that matter.

Sure the Mac has cool looking hardware, but beyond that is there really a compelling reason for techies/nerds to switch from Intel/AMD based machines?? I can't think of any real good reasons.

Ok, here are a few of those other reasons I mentioned earlier:

- it's not Windows, and one can be as free of M$ as one wants on a Mac (yet at the same time, one can use lots of M$ apps if one really wants to, for some ungodly reason)

- the most games of any non-M$ platform

- software and hardware integration, ease-of-use, and intuitiveness that (arguably) surpasses all other platforms

- minimal DRM issues (so far, anyway - cross those fingers ;)

- friendly to average Joes and hardcore geeks alike

- yes, you said it... style

- strength / dominance in certain notable computing applications & markets (graphics & media, biotech, education)

- arguably the most enjoyable platform-specific trade shows in the industry ;) (Ok, reaching here, but I thought I'd mention it :)

- longevity / resale value of old hardware (less of a consideration than it used to be, it seems, but still notable)

There are more factors, I think, but I believe that should be enough to start with.

This is really not a troll, I'm just trying to understand what the hoopla is. Please enlighten me!!

I hope this helps! :)

1. it violates many library confidentiality laws that exist at the state level, it's extra-legal unecessarily
2. it completely destroys the bond of trust that exists between a librarian and a patron. it's no one's business what you read and many libraries ensure patron confidentiality by not saving checkout records once a book had been returned [let's see Blockbuster do that!]. Many libraries are aggressively stepping this up post-PATRIOT
3. in cases of proven threat, or with due cause and due process, this information on known suspects has been available via a subpoena. This is just a random way to spy on everyone, cast a wide net and look like you're being tough on crime.
4. Hear the one about the guy brought in by the feds for looking at info on batteries?!

However, more than one person, pointed out the obvious. If Apple slashed its prices by say even $500 dollars on the big boy G4s and Powerbooks they would get a lot more converts. I can see paying a bit more for a mac but the laptop prices are just outrageous in my opinion. Not even comparing them to bargain basement priced PCs but to Dells for example and you have to sit back and scratch your head. They are good, sure. But are they that damn good?

this is a joke. 99.9% of Blizzard's customers have never even heard of bnetd.

Yeah, but I'm willing to bet that most of that 99.9% aren't "their most ardent supporters".

Blizzard is one of the best companies as far customer response

Correction: Blizzard WAS one of the best, until they were bought by Universal.

Back in the day when games could only be played over IPX networks, the biggest IPX over TCP program was kalled Kali. Blizzard went out of their way to make a binary that optimized for this game service

Yes, and how many years ago was that?

And (since we're talking Kali) what happened to future support for that? Oh yeah, Blizzard killed it - and sent C&D letters to Kali threatening them...

bnetd became a haven for people playing illegal betas for WCIII.

Ahh.. no, it didn't.. in fact bnetd NEVER supported WC3, and when the bnetd maintainers refused to add support for it, the people asking forked it.

Blame the people playing the WCIII betas, not Blizzard.

You (and Blizzard) seem to be blaming the bnetd people. So why aren't YOU blaming the right people?

In true Universal fashion, Blizzard focused their wrath on the wrong party, just because they could.

Building a Computer the Size of a Credit Card
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106247,0 0.asp

Sharp is showing off an LCD with a built-in CPU, and plans to use it in a new breed of mobile display devices by 2005.

Sharp and its partner Semiconductor Energy Laboratory unveiled Tuesday what the companies claim to be a world-first prototype of an LCD with an 8-bit CPU on its glass substrate.

Sharp runs computer on piece of glass
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/22/10345614 95445.html

Japan's leading liquid crystal display maker Sharp Corp said yesterday it had made an "epoch-making" step toward making ultra-flat "sheet computers" after it succeeded in running a computer on a tiny piece of glass.

The prototype it unveiled was a functioning tiny circuit board - from a Sharp central processing unit (CPU) originally made in 1977 - imprinted on a piece of glass some 15 millimetres square and one millimetre thick.

Running a PC on a piece of glass
http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/178311.htm

Japan's leading liquid crystal display maker Sharp Corp. said on Tuesday it had made an "epoch-making" step toward making ultra-flat "sheet computers" after it succeeded in running a computer on a tiny piece of glass.

The prototype it unveiled was a functioning tiny circuit board - from a Sharp central processing unit (CPU) originally made in 1977 - imprinted on a piece of glass some 15 millimeters (0.6 inches) square and one millimeter thick.

I was in Vietnam over the summer. Vietnam is #1 in the word for software piracy, with 94%. They cram everything they can fit onto a cd and with that comes some extra stuff you didn't even pay for...I was not surprised when I scanned five cds to find 4 of the 5 containing at least a few virii.

As the dotcom boom hits bottom you look around and notice that fewer and fewer services have competitors anymore. That's the way it has become in on-line payments. There are a couple of alternatives that may still unseat PayPal as the major player in the space, but now that eBay has them I doubt it.

Low barrier of entry means this and the auction space are ripe, but getting traction in it is hard.

What concerns me the most is the service aspect of the deal. PayPal has a bad reputation, but there is hope it will it will improve.

---
Go Daddy President Interview

I believe microsoft just released a bluetooth version of their mouse.

Of course, it _is_ microsoft.

I cringed when I saw the name TigerDirect. They're the ones who make crappy advertisements on PCWorld magazine.

AlienWare does a similar thing, but I've heard much better things about them than this Systemax company - they've been tagged the Cadillac of computers.

Not to mention, a high-end machine costs, at most, around/less than $3000.

An alternate explanation is that there's many that wish they could do the Turbo Capitalist thing and be like Bill G, but lack the balls or have some interferring residue of moral fiber. By helping line Bill's pockets, it's a vote for that system or ideology and, maybe, somehow, they'll get rich, too.

Probably not dissimilar from the phenomenon where slow, out of shape, fat guys put on sports jerseys and yell at the lean, fast guys on the television.

Or it could be another version of the lottery mentality-- comfortable, but utter denial of reality.

I said it in my comments to the Senate, and PC World quoted me. Search the link for "cost a fortune", right above "Hollywood's Loss".

Google searches for the news
ZDNet- 1hourago
Google unveiled on Monday an expanded test version of its search engine for current events and news, the latest step in the company's move into new markets.
Google Launches News ServicePCWorld
Google launches news search siteTelecomPaper(subscription)
CNET- and5related

I first delved into the world of OCR back in 98 with this product and havn't turned back. The current version is made by scansoft (the same makers as OmniPage), this product is much better. Even PCWorld has a review of it (March 2000).

It achieves 98% accuracy on typed text and can handle graphics, bullets and tables. These were big plusses for me. I still use the 98 version and have very few complaints. Dirty pages can be a problem, but it has frequently amazed me in how it catches characters in the midst of goop.

the trick was to use a gray scale scan or text mode, Also I scan at 300 DPI , I find it's important to give the OCR as much info as possible to work from.

I agree. The right settings are very important. I recommend some serious tweaking before you get to hard and heavy with it. For plain text, the above works great, although I sometimes prefer 150dpi. For anything with tables and graphics, 300dpi is a must. A good scanner can make a big difference too. My work uses network ready scanners that copy the file to a network share and the software picks up the files automatically. Very efficient.

There is a tool called ASF Recorder[pcworld.com] which would save streamed wmv files to your hard drive. It did mean that you had to sit through the entire, streamed file though in order to save it.
As for Microsoft DRM protected files take a look at the Free Me [nanocrew.net] files by Beale Screamer. This tool could be used to remove the protection from Microsoft WMA files.

What about the magazines that "Review" these printers? I mean it's pretty obvious that magazines like PC World, Home Computer Luser and all the other magazines that target clueless users, are basically just glorified advertising catalogs.

Oh yeah? Have you even read PC World, or are you just speaking from ignorance? If you check out PC World's latest Top 10 Ink Jet chart here
and look at the test reports and reviews attached to each listing, you'll see that they do some extensive testing on both ink costs and print speeds. Try getting that from glorified advertising catalogs.

What, you mean like when Windows NT took out the U.S.S. Yorktown?

Or perhaps the endless backdoors that no one can actually audit because the EULA doesn't allow for it? So even the most paranoid of the paranoid get owned as a result?

Or perhaps you should instead rephrase your question into "Why Linux?" and then go read what Peruvian Congressman Dr. Edgar David Villaneuca Nunez has to say about the matter?

Dare I mention Microsoft's well-known anti-competitive ways?

Sometimes--even if a commercial tool is "better" for the task (and I really don't think it is), blind application of pure personal utilitarianism means you have to set aside any morals about supporting a corporation that's as blatantly ruthless as Microsoft is.

But hey--if you don't mind contributing to Microsoft's current inhumanity, then by all means, go ahead and pay their outrageous licensing fees and the more power to ya.

No, really: you just go ahead and knock down your straw man--in this case perhaps named the "One True Operating System" zealot--and the rest of us sane individuals will keep on doing real work with tools we know we can trust.

There was a similar question a while ago about sunlight-viewable screens. The information there may be of use.

To parrot my own previous comment, NEC sells a laptop called the Versa DayLite (aka the LaVie MX in Japan) with a special "reflective LCD" screen that makes it usable outdoors. It also allows it (along with a second internal battery behind the screen) to run up to 8 hours.

On the downside, the screen isn't very good indoors - NEC says it's "suitable for occasional indoor use". The user reviews I've read agree with this (but for your application this doesn't seem too important). PCWorld also has a review.

But that cost isn't paid to the person receiving and disposing of the piece of unwanted mail.

Repost the rest of my paragraph: This places the primary burden on the sender where it belongs and keeps the burden on the reciever solidly in check. Not to mention the fact that Mailbox Etc rests upon a well functioning system where 99.99% of all mail arrives at your doorstep free.
If that wasn't clear enough: in postal mail the vast majority of the burden is on the sender, therefore the sender cannot cause substantial harm without bankrupting himself and ending the problem. With E-mail the vast majority of the burden is on the receiver. The sender can cause unlimited harm with profits of 1/100th of a cent per e-mail.

Are you suggesting that we should raise the price to send email?

No, but to look at your suggestion, 1/2 cent per e-mail should solve the problem. The real costs aren't that high, meaning it would have to be an imposed fee. Bad solution.

Ahh, but half that rate is adaquate if it is credited to the receiver. I'm certainly willing to give my friends a 1/4 cent with each e-mail I send. Now that *is* a good solution. We just need an internet micropayment system in place first. I'd be facinated to hear you oppinion on this plan. Be careful to note that it applies to everyone equally, not just spammers. A global opt-in system. Anyone using the system would either bounce or silently drop any e-mail without a micropayment attached.

There are two major differences with junk faxes. First of all, there are actual costs of receiving a junk fax - paper, toner, etc. Further, at the time of the junk fax law, the phone company had a government granted monopoly on phone service.

It doesn't matter if the data is carried by carrier pigeons and regulated by the Pope. The the problem is a sender using automated generation of huge numbers of messages and placing the burden on the receiver. I don't care how it gets there, floods of crap to my fax machine is a problem.

As to actual costs to the reciever: My e-mail trash folder currently has 99 spams in it. Average spam size: 5.39k. This article quotes a spammer as sending up to 50 million spams per week. 5.39k * 50 million is 257 gigabytes. Most of the people who get spam are on dialup. You are looking at thousands in real cash costs.

The federal government saw fit to assess a $1500 fine per junk fax. (All fax spam is indeed a willfull violation unless you made an honest mistake such as mis-dialing.) Would you be happy setting the fine for spam at 1/100th that? $15 per e-mail?

I think we should gradually move to eliminate government intervention in the phone system.

I read that as an indirect request to repeal the law against junk faxes. Perhaps you think they are going to pay my phone bill for me?

I would contend that it takes a lot less than one second to spot and delete spam.

Seperating spam without losing legitimate mail is non-trivial. Spammers want you to open the mail and try to make them look legitimate. The average is easily 1 second, expecially if you have to open any to check.

But still, I don't think you can factor that cost in. It's too incidental.

That is nothing short of willfull blindness.

1 second per spam at minimum wage is over $50,000 in labor costs just to delete one spammer's batch-of-the-week. Plus the cost(harm) of any legitimate mail accidentally deleted because of it. Seperating spam is a mentally intensive task, not something you hand to a minimum wage employee if you expect any accuracy.

per meg anywhere near that of a typical home connection

Do you have a price quote on spammer bandwith?

If you saturate dialup I calculate 0.2 cents per meg. But they are priced based on average usage, maybe 100 meg per month? $20 for 100 meg is 5 cents per meg. Anyone who saturates a home connection either gets cut off, or inflates the rate for everyone else. For commercial connections you *are* paying for the full pipe. Unless you're paying over $800,000 a month for a T3, or over $25,000 for a T1, you are paying less to send it on a commercial connection than people pay downloading it.

I certainly don't condone breaking your contract

Even if we assumed every spammer suddenly stopped using "dirty tricks", the internet is still a single pooled resource, GLOBALLY. You keep talking about contracts, well, for data entering the internet the only restriction would be the weakest contract in the world. Then it goes anywhere.

They shouldn't be accepting emails from random anonymous internet users.

Sounds like you conceed my proof that there is no convievable way the spammer paid for this spam to be delivered. Now to refute your reply:

#1 They don't know who who sent it until they receive it.
#2 Just because someone else pays more for service than you do doesn't give you the right to say they can't use E-mail.
#3 I maintain ALL mail delivery is paid for by the receiver. This case just makes it blatantly impossible that the spammer is paying it.

>do they pay for my friends' connections to send me valued e-mail.
They almost certainly do

For starters they would have to pay double normal comercial rates just to cover the spam delvery. Ten add the ISP's increased costs associated with hosting spammers (see below). Then add every company along the chain would pocket a little more profit. Then anything above that could go towards lowering other peoples rates. But if everyone else's rates are subsidized as you claim, the spammer would have had to pay MORE than double the commercial rate back in the first step to reflect the un-subsidized rate of delivery.

You seem focused on "spammers pay more". Did you ever consider that they pay more because the ISP has higher costs and headaches for hosting spammers? For starters they are going to pocket a bigger profit themselves, just because they can. Spamming is virtually the only task that will genuinely saturate a connection. They spend more on laywers. They may have to play wack-a-mole with their parent providers. They often have to change address ranges and domains. They get more complaints. They are a hacker/DOS target. Other ISP's often block their data. And, perhaps most of all, they loose their non-spammer customers. And who know what other costs, I'm not in the bussiness. It is also likely their parent ISP will have many of the same inflated costs as well.

Somewhere along the chain there is an ISP which is profiting off of spam

Yeah, someone makes a buck. It's a self-serving fantacy to think that that money goes to the people who get the spam. I think I've shown that home connections cost more than the spammer's connection, and I've definitly shown that the "incidental cost" is more than the spammer paid.

If this fantacy were true then no network would try to block incoming spam because it brings profit with it and lets them lower rates. Top level ISP's would have to charge higher rates to any ISP that blocked in-bound spam. LOL.

You also seem to have ignored my example to the spammer sending millions of spams to one machine. The effects are blatant when you consolidate them like that. The example is not unreasonable either. It isn't unusual for a spammer to send an entire batch to different names@somedomain.com, either names scraped from the web, or a dictionary attack, or even brute forcing names. It's quite possible that somedomain is one machine.

-

Ok, I can't convince you anything about neofascist kooks, however the Libertarian Party does care about free speech. Check out these links.

The LP condemns the CBDTPA
The LP calls for Dmitry Sklyarov's release
This link quotes Harry Browne as saying "I believe we need to end limits on encryption." (Its about 2/3 down the page)

So yes, the libertarian party, as well as its leaders, does care about issues with technology and free speech.

2002-08-17 23:19:36 Intel, Gateway and HP Sued Over P4 Performance (articles,intel) (rejected)

This article title isn't that misleading, but a couple other ones I read gave that impression moreso. It's all the same bullshit memo from the FBI, but different people tried to skew it into a more interesting story to varying degrees:

• http://www.upside.com/News/3d5aaa991.html
• http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,103965,0 0.asp

There was another one I read before that was even worse, but I can't seem to find it now. You can read the actual letter from the FBI here though: http://www.politechbot.com/p-03884.html.

cough, they did, cough

And if that isn't enough, how 'bout another word:

Spammer.

The ACLU has a a long track record of defending spam as somehow Frea Speach that's worthy of First Amendment protection.

1997: "commercial speech restrictions on telemarketing calls and unsolicited fax advertisements have passed First Amendment challenges but direct mail and door-to-door solicitations enjoy much greater protection. Given the Supreme Court decision in ACLU v. Reno, on-line messages should receive the same First Amendment protection given traditional print media, which includes commercial mailings."

2000: "...and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that oppose any restrictions on commercial e-mail"

2001:The argument raised by the ACLU and other memters of the First Amendment lobby is that spam, like junk mail in our offline mailboxes, is a nuisance that still must be protected."

In fact, ACLU has always supported spammers, going back to 1995.

Source: CuD (Computer underground Digest) 7.50

This issue of CuD quotes from Canter and Siegel's (the original "Green Card Lawyers" spammers) as follows:

"In May of 1994, believing that the EFF really did support freedom of speech in the same broad and democratic manner as did the ACLU, we initiated a discussion with Mike Godwin, an EFF lawyer. We wanted his views on the censorship issues raised by the behavior of electronic vandals and access providers who had pulled our account for performing the perfectly legal act of Internet advertising. We were amazed when Godwin stated to us that he was so busy sympathizing with those who opposed us, that he had no sympathy left for the other side. So much for freedom of speech (p. 194)."

-- Canter and Siegel, "How to make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and other On-line Services", 1995

To which I can only add:

"Fuck the ACLU and the pigload of potted meat product it rode in under."

-- Me, 2002.

"Software that promises users anonymity on the Web has caught the eye of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's nonprofit venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, which says the technology can help the spy agency fulfill its mission."

From http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,41462,00 .asp Feb 13, 2001.

If you are wondering what 'mission' they are referring to:

"Internet May Threaten National Security:

Wars of the future may be fought with viruses and hack attacks, not with guns and bombs, studies say. During the next 15 years, the U.S. will face a new breed of Internet-enabled terrorists, criminals, and nation/state adversaries that will launch attacks not with planes and tanks, but with computer viruses and logic bombs, according to two reports released last month."

That from http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,37483,00 .asp. January 4, 2001.

Open source or not, I wouldn't choose to use this software...

"Software that promises users anonymity on the Web has caught the eye of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's nonprofit venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, which says the technology can help the spy agency fulfill its mission."

From http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,41462,00 .asp Feb 13, 2001.

If you are wondering what 'mission' they are referring to:

"Internet May Threaten National Security:

Wars of the future may be fought with viruses and hack attacks, not with guns and bombs, studies say. During the next 15 years, the U.S. will face a new breed of Internet-enabled terrorists, criminals, and nation/state adversaries that will launch attacks not with planes and tanks, but with computer viruses and logic bombs, according to two reports released last month."

That from http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,37483,00 .asp. January 4, 2001.

Open source or not, I wouldn't choose to use this software...

Something like the debate back in '99?

Some links about the alleged backdoor in Windows allowing the NSA access to your computer are here, here and here.

The U.S. "Federal Communications Commission" (FCC) set forth new rules this week on how telecommunications carriers can share certain customer information, giving telecom-related service providers a faster track to consumer data.

Carriers can share caller information with affiliates or third-party agents that provide communications-related services using an "opt-out" approach, the FCC said. The policy means that consumers' information will be shared unless they opt-out when receiving a notice of the carrier's intent to share their information.

However, when a carrier wishes to share customer information with an unrelated third party or affiliate that does not provide telecommunication-related services, the carrier must adopt an "opt-in" approach, which requires consumers to provide their consent, the FCC said.

The rules govern what the FCC calls "customer proprietary network information" (CPNI), which includes information on what services consumers subscribe to and to whom and where they call.

Up until 1999, the FCC held an opt-in policy for the sharing of all CPNI by carriers. However, these rules were vacated when a Tenth Circuit appeals court ruled in favor of U.S. West, which had filed suit claiming a "First Amendment" right to share the information under an opt-out approach.

Since then, the rules have been in a "state of play," an FCC spokesman said, with all information being shared under an opt-out approach.

Privacy advocates are taking a wait-and-see approach to the new guidelines, saying will lie in how carriers go about informing consumers of their sharing practices.

"The test is going to be whether the opt-out option is easily available and exercised," said Paula Bruening, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology ("CDT").

Telephone companies will be allowed to share, without consent, private customer data with affiliates that offer communications-related services, under rules adopted by the "Federal Communications Commission" on Tuesday.

Consumers will have to opt out of having their information used for marketing purposes, including where, when and to whom they place calls, as well as the types of services subscribers use and how frequently they use them.

The FCC left the door open for companies to use an opt-in approach if they so choose, but the agency refused to mandate that method.

However, the agency said consumers must approve when a telephone company wants to share their private information with unrelated third parties or affiliated companies that do not provide communications-related services.

The decision drew a sharp rebuke from the lone Democrat on the panel, who argued that companies would be allowed to sell information without customer consent to the highest bidder who has just the faintest association with providing telecommunications services.

"FCC"'s contentious ruling gives 'affiliated' parties default access to customer data, requires opt-in for others.

Phone companies now can share a consumer's private information with certain affiliates without first getting that customer's consent, a new Federal Communications Commission ruling says.

Details of who customers call, when they call, and how long they talk may be shared with communications-related corporate affiliates, the ruling says. Customers can choose to keep such information private, but must initiate the request. The carrier does not have to ask permission.

When it comes to sharing customer data with unaffiliated third parties, the default is reversed under the FCC's new rule. Telecom companies must get the consumers' express consent to "opt in," the FCC says.Advertisement

The decision, announced Tuesday by a somewhat divided FCC, has roiled privacy advocates who say data could be used for consumer profiling by companies with only weak links to the phone carriers.

"Everyone should understand that this decision is neither narrow or pro-privacy," says FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who dissented in part with the decision over privacy concerns.

The unclear definition of "corporate affiliates" that can access customer data invites abuse, Copps says. Consumers might find their phone companies "selling to the highest bidder personal and detailed information...as long as these companies use it for some 'communications-related' purpose and have some undefined murky affiliation," he says.

Privacy advocates expressed similar concerns.

"Corporate families are pretty big. I don't know [that] customers feel as familial about the relationship as corporations," says Mikal Condon, staff counsel at the "Electronic Privacy Information Center".

[ ... ]

However, Condon says the court ruling will likely be used as precedent in the states, discouraging any change from the FCC's new rule. States are "pretty much guaranteed litigation" if they require consumer consent, she says.

Legislation introduced by Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) would require consumer consent in all cases. However, the measure, Senate Bill 1928, but it does appear to have enough support to pass, Condon says.

Doing some quick research, it would appear that a computer (without monitor) that is always on costs on average approximately $100.00 per year. Of course multiplying that times 10,000 gives you an annual cost of $1,000,000.00 or $83,333.33 per month. The actual costs would depend upon the system components, speed, etc...

If they each had a 14 inch monitor that was always on, it would double the bill annually. I can't imagine they would have one monitor for each machine, that would make no sense. The way I figure it, they still have one heck of a bill each month when speaking from a Joe Schmoe standpoint, but I don't think that they would have any trouble meeting that bill with the traffic they get and their limited advertising. Of course that bill is just for the computers themselves, not to mention the cooling infrastructure, lighting, etc... Anyone have any experience in the area of cluster cooling and the expenses associated with it? I know I saw something on Discovery or TLC about the units used in the old days, but what about now?

All of my statistics came from here.

Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking.

If margins are so tight, I can't figure out how destroking could be happening. I associate intentional crippling of products with monopolies.

PCWORLD did a story on Opt-In suing its ISP so they couldn't be disconnected:

Opt-In Marketing Services, an e-mail advertising firm based in Mandeville, Louisiana, has filed suit against its ISP, the backbone provider, and three antispam organizations claiming restraint of trade and deceptive practices.

Opt-In Marketing Services is one of several commercial e-mailers associated with Ronnie Scelson, a well-known spammer. However, Turner says that his company complies with all federal and state regulations for commercial e-mail and asks consumers for permission before sending advertisements to their in-boxes.

In the suit, Turner claims the three antispam organizations are "sinister entities" that have conspired to put him out of business by blacklisting his Internet addresses. He says the organizations faked many of the complaints received by Qwest and CoVista, use phony names and addresses, and received donations from AOL and MSN in return for ignoring those large ISPs' efforts to send their own unsolicited commercial e-mail.

"They have their own set of rules which have no basis in law," Turner claims in a written statement. "They threaten to blacklist anyone they do not like or who has not worked out a "deal' with them. They hide their identities, refuse to give their true locations, or addresses, [and] generate fake complaints."

Of the three organizations, only Spamcop forwards complaints to ISPs or solicits donations. Julian Haight, president of Seattle-based Spamcop, admits it's possible someone faked the complaints, "but they'd have to be very smart geeks to forge the e-mail headers well enough to fool us." He also says his organization has never received money from any major ISP and does not engage in reciprocal deals, noting that Spamcop recently blacklisted AOL for a few hours after a series of spam complaints.

Spamhaus.org director Steve Linford says it's highly unlikely that anyone sent fake complaints, given that it's possible to easily verify e-mail messages by checking the logs at the ISP from which they're sent. Rather than hide from spammers, Linford has posted explicit instructions on how to locate him on the news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail newsgroup.

Linford adds that Opt-In Marketing might get more than it bargained for. "If a spammer sued us we'd go straight for discovery, find out their real names and addresses, and forward that information to the FTC and their state attorney general," he says

The e-mailer claims that CoVista Communications of Little Falls, New Jersey, was wrong to cut off part of its Internet access on April 30. According to the suit, the shutdown resulted from complaints received by CoVista and its backbone provider, Qwest Communications of Denver, from Spamcop.net, Spamhaus.org, and the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS). All three organizations operate so-called blacklists that enable subscribers to block e-mail coming from suspected spam operations.

"Consider a future where all appliances with power cords can be networked using universal plug and play including:

computers
telephones
stereos
even refrigerators"

http://www.powerlinecommunications.net/smarthomes. htm

Nice diagram of the LG I-fridge as a "Residential Gateway":
http://www.slfp.com/011302BIZp.htm

"Internet Refrigerator"
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/may98/0121.html

"Can Your Refrigerator Surf?"
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,14675,00 . sp

But, most of all, I want to point out the comments that my own company makes about *its* I-fridge:

"We created the first Internet refrigerator to show how the Internet will merge into our everyday lives"
http://au.fujitsu.com/FAL/CDA/Articles/0,1029,546, 00.html

What is with this incessant desire to make things ever smaller and smaller? I'm just going to take my teeny tiny Motorola V. Series 66 phone, my ultra slim Fujitsu LifeBook S-4510 , which of course is running with QNX as the operating system, viewing the worlds smallest website and neatly set them all in my Mini Cooper S and drive off the nearest curb, falling to my death while transferring all my life's memories onto my IBM Microdrive.

Rambus has been pulling some rather blatant violations of anti trust laws especially with the whole JDEC thing... doesn't their upper management see that? It just seems so silly of them to pull this kind of stuff when they could continue their revenue growth based on the strength of legitimate business practices. Ethics issues aside, doesn't it make more sense to play right rather than take the risk of losing your Intellectual property and losing your money in court? They took a significant risk and lost with their legal strategy starting to crack.

Is it a sign of a greater ethics issue in the industry or is it high level management who can't figure out how to solve a problem other than to pursue a costly and risky legal battle? I think its both, and investors should be wary about putting any more money into this company.