Slashdot Mirror

Charles Bronson writes "A Mass. clothing company who's producing a new line of footware called 'Earth Shoes,' has filed suit against hobbyist Tony Saunders, who owns operates earth.com. Despite the fact that he does not conduct commerce and he has been using earth.com since 1994, some years prior to the existance of Earth Shoes, the company claims that he is infringing upon their trademark. What trademark? Well, in 1984, the company alledgly trademarked 'Earth' and 'Earth Shoe.'"

Charles Bronson sent us a link to a ZDNet story with an Update to the story we posted yesterday about Sighsound.com claiming a patent on the sale of downloadable music, and demanding a 1% royalty from mp3.com. Apparently Goodnoise is actually complying!

Charles Bronson wrote in to tell us that Slackware now has its own domain name. Shockingly enough, its Slackware.com. The distribution that so many of us learned to love Linux on now has a happy home on the web. If there's one thing for certain, its that Slackware users are definitely attached to their distribution. Dave says its because of Slack's advanced packaging system *grin*.

Charles Bronson writes "Toshiba Corp. in Japan announced today that they've developed the world smallest DRAM chip, with help from Big Blue. '[Toshiba] had achieved a chip-zide reduction of 40 percent with 0.175 micron technology.' Mass production won't start until late '99. This actually sounds promising, because the article reports that the smaller DRAM chips will help to lower costs. The bottom half explains that Toshiba and Fujitsu have teamed up to make even smaller DRAM chips (0.13 micron) availed by March 2002. 'Sound like a lofty goal to me."

Charles Bronson writes "This ZDNet article reports that Intel will be unveiling the new Pentium III chip, previously code-named "Katmai," on Monday. 'The Pentium III will begin 450MHz and 500MHz...' No mention of price, of course.. " My guess is you'll need to mortgage your home.

Charles Bronson writes "To give credit where credit's due, I got this off of LinuxToday, but I thought it might stand a chance at Slashdot. It's the same routine OSS article we've been seeing, only it has a quote I haven't seen before. The excerpt: Microsoft executives dismiss open-source as hype. ``Complex future projects to add such functions as automatic translation of e-mail require big teams and big capital,'' said Ed Muth, a Microsoft group marketing manager. ``These are things that Robin Hood and his merry band in Sherwood Forest aren't well attuned to do.'' I just thought that was hilarious. " All I wanna know is who's Little John?

Charles Bronson writes "If you notice, at the bottom of this article, Robert Young mentions that Red Hat is currently in talks with IBM (and hence, he cannot talk about it any further). This could be big news for Linux if any sort of deal goes through. Remember what launched Microsoft.."

Charles Bronson writes "I don't think I'd be caught dead in one, but two start-up companies called Xybernaut and ViA Inc. and entering the wearable computer market. IBM might jump on the wearable PC wagon, releasing the Visionpad (tentative name) based on the Thinkpad 560." Next time I see an article that says 'Geek Chic' I'm gonna vomit. This one still looks like the cost will be prohibitive, but how much longer are we going to have to say that?

Charles Bronson writes "A column by Michael Surkan went up on ZDNet today titled "I come not to praise Linux." Basically, it dismisses Linux as not being a serious threat to Microsoft. He makes the typical point, the one repeated over and over in the media, that Linux is too anarchic for big-time users, apparently ignoring the growing number of big-times users using Linux. As well, he dismissed the importance of The Halloween Document as "being grossly exaggerated in its importance. Just like Linux.""