Slashdot Mirror

Ellison No Longer board member of Apple.

According to this press release from the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America), there will be some major crackdowns on music piracy on the Internet. The RIAA plans to launch a massive investigation on peer-to-peer networks. Peer-to-peer network is the term for the networks that power such software as BearShare, Limewire, Gnutella, Morpheous, and of course the now-defunct Napster. They will be targeting users that are sharing copyrighted files and collecting evidence. This evidence will be the basis of hundreds of lawsuits they have planned, which are scheduled to start as early as August.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, The River is required to assist the RIAA, MPAA, or anyone else with copyright concerns. We can be subpoenaed for information on our customer's full names, addresses and other information, should the copyright holder prove a valid suspicion that the account in question has been distributing copyrighted materials.

On a related note, a recent statement by the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) espouses destroying computers suspected of illegal behavior remotely. You may read the AP article here.

As always, we will do our best to protect your privacy within the constraints of the law and keep you educated on what you need to know to stay safe.

Other Links:

EFF's response to RIAA lawsuits
The Slashdot discussion thread
Artists Against the RIAA

Sony is Japanese, Royal Dutch Phillips is well.. Dutch. "Overseas" depends on what see you're over, I guess.

MS makes HUGE margins on its software partially because it is a (convicted) monopolist. If you have the clout to force all hardware manufacturers to ship your OS and pay your tax, well you're bound to be profitable. I wouldnt call a convicted company a "great" american company would you..

Maybe your grandkids will be lucky and get into the India's future version of the H1B program to encourage tech workers to move and work there. :)

Seriously, there will always be a need for a highly skilled and highly educated workforce.

In case you're interested, here are some more links about this and other related issues that we have seen before.

Leaked: IBM Execs Urge Moving Jobs Offshore in Internal Teleconference

An internal recording of an IBM teleconference about moving jobs offshore was leaked (Google) to the New York Times by an upset employee. From the article: '...under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks... I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees. "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," said Tom Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations. He also said that 3 million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 (based on a Forrester Research report, which represents about 2 percent of all American jobs) and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries. Oracle plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines.' Critics say 'schools will stop producing the computer engineers and programmers we need for the future' as a result of these moves. Listen to the IBM recording in Real format (direct link at pnm://audio.nytimes.com/audiosrc/2003/07/21/busine ss/20030722jobs.audio.rm). More at the SJMN, Inquirer, and CNN/Reuters. Slashdot has discussed Global competition, offshore outsourcing, lower cost replacement workers and the ensuing legal turmoil before.

To paraphrase from the movie Jerry Maguire:
It's not technology friends, It's technology business.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/484 4089.htm

Dan Gillmore isn't so crazy about this Southeast "innovation".

They actually resort to *paying* people to use thier IM client?? Maybe they're testing out that new exploit...

Yahoo opens software center in India - causing further damage to the US economy.

As for parts costs, MS does have some leeway with their suppliers. As CPU prices drop, MS could possibly negotiate for a better price from Intel, but they've already pissed off nVidia.

You are right that more XBox sales would help MS with bragging rights with game makers. The latest MS financial reports probably have undermined any clout that might have had. The XBox division lost $180 million last year and $348 million this year. Game makers know that MS needs them and not the other way around. What I don't know is what kind of terms MS gives game makers. It can't be all that lucrative as hordes of game makers have not released games for XBox. At E3, MS announced many new titles but most of them were from companies owned by MS.

Bottom line is that MS cannot continue on it's course without lossing a ton of money. Hacking the XBox only hurts their bottom line further.

Very, very few people, apparently, have both technical knowledge and managerial knowledge.

The problem mentioned in the Slashdot story appears to be that Bruce Chizen, Adobe president, is not prepared for the intellectual challenge of running a technical company. He's been a salesman and marketing manager all his life. Now Adobe has become dependent on Acrobat, and has a big customer for Acrobat, the IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service).

It's amazing. The job pays extremely well, even though the smart people are gone, Adobe has laid off people, and the stock is slowly sliding.

We live in a business climate in which a few people at the top make a huge amount of money, and other people suffer, even though they helped make the money.

There seems to be a pattern with technological companies. The people who really understand the technology get tired and go on to other things, or are forced out of the company they founded (as was Jobs at Apple). Everyone pretends that nothing has happened, and the company runs on inertia for a while. With luck, the new managers, who try to hide the fact that they really don't understand what the company does, encounter a business upturn. But inside the company is dying.

John Sculley was a sugar water salesman (Pepsi) before he came to Apple and forced Jobs out. Apple looked okay for a while, but slowly lost importance. Then Jobs came back, and Apple became very important.

Adobe's Postscript is brilliant technology. Using Postscript to make PDF files is brilliant. Knowing what photo editing tools need to go into Photoshop requires deep technical understanding. Probably Bruce Chizen understands none of this. Can a manager run something he does not understand? No.

Very, very few people, apparently, have both technical knowledge and managerial knowledge.

The problem mentioned in the Slashdot story appears to be that Bruce Chizen, Adobe president, is not prepared for the intellectual challenge of running a technical company. He's been a salesman and marketing manager all his life. Now Adobe has become dependent on Acrobat, and has a big customer for Acrobat, the IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service).

It's amazing. The job pays extremely well, even though the smart people are gone, Adobe has laid off people, and the stock is slowly sliding.

We live in a business climate in which a few people at the top make a huge amount of money, and other people suffer, even though they helped make the money.

There seems to be a pattern with technological companies. The people who really understand the technology get tired and go on to other things, or are forced out of the company they founded (as was Jobs at Apple). Everyone pretends that nothing has happened, and the company runs on inertia for a while. With luck, the new managers, who try to hide the fact that they really don't understand what the company does, encounter a business upturn. But inside the company is dying.

John Sculley was a sugar water salesman (Pepsi) before he came to Apple and forced Jobs out. Apple looked okay for a while, but slowly lost importance. Then Jobs came back, and Apple became very important.

Adobe's Postscript is brilliant technology. Using Postscript to make PDF files is brilliant. Knowing what photo editing tools need to go into Photoshop requires deep technical understanding. Probably Bruce Chizen understands none of this. Can a manager run something he does not understand? No.

Weaker still when you take into accout the fact that the GPL has never been proved legal in a court of law. The FSF may think the GPL is strong enough, but others differ.

Cheers,

Morel

To elaborate, this (also this)
is what I'm worried about.

They can pry my DNA from my cold dead hands.

For those of you who seem to think that blind people can't be intelligent, have desires, or in short be anything like you, check out this article in today's Mercury News. T.V. Raman is a Cornell CS PhD, a serious emacs hacker, a major open-source advocate (check out the emacspeak web page for his complaints on "forced fenestration"!), and also happens to be blind...

Should be fascinating to see how people react as they start to find out how often security problems actually occur...

Exactly.

WiFi is not unmetered as the /. editor presumes either. Someone pays for the bandwidth at some point. It is just more difficult to bill to a user of a wifi hotspot, other than the model of $3/hr or whatever McDonald's (not a joke) wants to charge for access after the free trial is over.

And if you use MSN to search "microsoft google slashdot", you get this, which is about Microsoft, and barely mentions google or slashdot.

Trip down memory lane here....
Remember Steven and Peter Olsen the next time you decide to swing sideways on the swing and optionally give out a Tarzan like yell. At least they've told the media that they're not going to persue patent violations in court.

Wish all of the ludicrous patents would follow suit...

-B

Suprise, we now have Microsoft giving the reason they licensed SCO Unix: They believe IBM to be the biggest threat to them.

See these articles on the same memo: here, and here

He also is afraid that there is a "...greater focus on doing more with less" in business, which could spell trouble for Microsoft.

Dan Gillmor wrote a column in advance of this decision, worth a read at http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/598 9915.htm

Did they already try this and fail miserably?

It was called MusicNet.

From the link: "The original MusicNet that launched in December 2001 was a dismal failure...The subscriber numbers were so low that MusicNet has never been willing to state them in public."

GPL Legal Battle Coming?
posted by Dan Gillmor 12:06 AM

The free software movement has surmounted all kinds of obstacles in its short history, moving from a political statement to a prominent position inside the world's largest companies.

A battle may -- repeat, may -- be shaping up over whether the GNU General Public License, or GPL, can be enforced. If it gets to court, this could be a pivotal case.

The GPL is the legal core of the movement. It's basically a copyright agreement. It gives users of GPL-licensed software the right to see the source code, or programming instructions, of the software and to make modifications. But there's a string attached: If you create software that is derived from software previously licensed under the GPL, you must release what you've written under the same license.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which monitors the scene and enforces the GPL, says a Mountain View company has been violating the GPL for more than a year. The foundation calls the violations serious and is threatening a lawsuit.

The specifics of the FSF's beef with OpenTV have to do with the company's policies in sending source code to licensees of OpenTV software tools created under the GPL. According to the foundation, OpenTV has either refused to provide the code, or has attached improper conditions on providing it, to several programmers who have every right to it.

OpenTV's intellectual property lawyer, Scott Doyle, says there's been missed communications on both sides but that the company has no intention of violating any legal agreements. He says the company plans to post the code in question online.

But if the FSF is right that OpenTV is violating the GPL, and if this behavior is found to be legal by the courts, the entire free-software and open-source movements could be derailed. Agreeing to share the improvements you make in the GPL-licensed software you've used is an essential part of the larger ecosystem.

Some people I respect say the GPL is a bad idea, period. They say it's too restrictive of programmers' rights, in the sense of forcing them to open what they've done to the world. Fine: If you don't like the GPL, don't create software from code that used it in the first place. Then put different licensing terms on what you've done.

But legal agreements are supposed to matter in our system. Just because the GPL turns the idea of intellectual property somewhat around doesn't make it less valid.

--- From here ---

Tom Brown
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
In soviet russia, all your us are belong to base!
Karma: Redundant

Recent articles haven't mentions Digiportal or Mail Frontier, so it is possible that they have come to an agreement with Mailblocks.

Full article (dated 4/05/03) from the San Jose Mercury News.

...the site listed by /. is slashdotted so here are some useful links. In a nut shell I am not sold by this thing because it lacks a real purpose(for myself anyways). Maybe one day I will move into a 10,000 sq foot house and have plenty of hallways, laptops and time to play around with the ER-1.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/461 9368.htm

http://www.evolution.com/product/consumer

Steve Jobs took a 90 million dollar Jet and fucked over AAPL shareholders. Dont feel bad. If they can pay Jobs to fly on a Jet they bought him, they can fix a fucking broken Apple.

Apple pays Jobs for use of jet the company bought him
By Jon Fortt
Mercury News

Apple Computer has paid Chief Executive Steve Jobs more than $1.2 million for the use of a Gulfstream V jet it bought for him two years ago. Apple paid nearly $90 million for the jet, taxes and its delivery.

Apple reported it paid Jobs $84,000 during the last fiscal quarter for company use of his private jet. The disclosure was made in Apple's quarterly report filed with the Securities Exchange Commission and made public Monday.

Before last quarter's reimbursement, Apple said it had paid Jobs $1.16 million for his use of the jet since Jobs received it in May 2001. Jobs continues to draw a salary of $1. Apple declined to comment on the latest reimbursement. In the past, the company has said the plane saves Apple time and money.

The quarterly report also said Apple's $24 million first-quarter restructuring effort included layoffs of 260 workers worldwide, less than 3 percent of the workforce.

Apple said it is moving ahead with product development efforts and continues to hire engineers. The company announced Monday two new Xserve server products. The Xserve rack-mounted server, which Apple introduced last year, now has faster single or dual 1.33-gigahertz processors and a 167-megahertz system bus. The base price has dropped $200 to $2,799. The Xserve RAID storage product, which is arriving a couple of months behind schedule, offers 720 gigabytes of storage for $5,999, up to 2.5 terabytes for 10,999.

Apple said that while Xserve RAID is designed to work with any server, it expects to sell them only to customers who already own Xserve. Apple expects video professionals, especially those dealing with high-definition footage, to be the ideal customers.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a website received newspaper coverage, but its idea is applicable anywhere.

http://www.local2me.com/

Here's the newspaper article:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bus iness/columnists/david_plotnikoff/2759439.htm

The website has a simple idea: one huge email list, filtered by location. People register their location (by ZIP code), and other optional information about themselves, when signing up. All email submissions go into a central database, then they are reflected only to those people who have chosen to receive them. It can also be filtered by age range and other categories, and multiple filters can be applied.

For instance, I have chosen to receive emails from everybody 10 or fewer miles away from me, and emails from people in my age range 20 or fewer miles away.

On the service, people swap recommendations all the time. The mailing list has helped me find a good veterinarian in the area!

Because of the publicity generated by the media coverage, this service is most popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it does have support for nationwide ZIP codes.

It could be better: I wish it had a browseable archive of postings that could be similarly filtered, instead of it being a simple email forwarder. That would make it easy to browse past answers to FAQ's. But, it is very good for what it does offer.

Oregonian

The Register

Dan Gillmor

DirectX, RDX RSX and MMX Technology

(I didn't bother submitting it 5 days ago when I first found out about it, because of /.'s 99% rejection rate.)

Sorry, it is not a joke.

more information here

This was actually posted on /. about a year or so back.

The father filed the patent to teach his son about how the US patent system works, figuring something so ridiculous and obvious would never get patented.

Two years later, he got back the news, patent approved.

Oddly enough, it does not appear to have been overturned, or would I have to look someplace else to find that out?

Here's a story about this from October 2002.

Here's a link to ribbon speaker tech.

I remember lusting after big flat panel speakers when I was a teen (15 years ago!) because they were cool-looking and were a different technology than a magnet wiggling a cone of some random material. I just love it when people rail about Bose speakers using 20 year-old technology when in fact nearly every speaker you can buy is using the same decades old technology -- the primary difference being WHAT type of cone the magnet is wiggling. Sure, some polymers sound better than some papers but its like the combustion engine - it can only go so far until a new tech replaces it.

Mercury News Jan 19, 2003

Eastside Journal May 15, 2002

or google for fry's renton for more hits.

That's patently untrue. It's a well-known fact that Microsoft's security problems are not due to exposure alone.

Microsoft's development model is fundamentally flawed from a security perspective, because it squarely places featureset additions above security. The corporate culture at Microsoft is and always has been more about gaining marketshare than about anything else.

It seems that there are differences in security, above and beyond the monopoly domination Microsoft enjoys. How many ISPs use FreeBSD to run their servers? Hmm.. I wonder if there's more to it than just speed and the fact that FreeBSD is Open Source.

I'm not alone in my assesment. There's this security guru named Bruce Schneier. Perhaps his name has crossed your desktop at some point. He's contemplating getting a Mac, because he is tired of hassling with security problems on his Windows machines.

Anyone care to compute out how long it would take to actually fill that 20GB hard drive that USB 1 speed?

a. Google News

Dan Gillmor, who broke this story, mentioned in an update the possibility, that the weblog links can be used to improve Google News.

But Google doesn't need to buy Pyra for that. Google can spider any leading weblog they want. Yes, there was this problem of interlinked weblogs resulting in a high PR (PageRank) for certain logs, but Google fixed that problem by giving more value to outgoing links then incoming links. They don't need to buy Blogger for indexing of weblogs.

b. Portal

Another suggestion that has been made: Google is moving to a portal.

I refuse to believe that Google is getting megalomanic. Besides, we all know what happened to AltaVista.

c. Direct access

Jshare suggested Google bought Blogger to get direct access to blog data.

But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?

d. Journal with ads

Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.

But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).

Whatever the reason is behind the buy, it will have a huge impact. The simple fact that one of the hottest internet companies buys Pyra's Blogger will make the product main stream in months.

Henk van Ess editor of Voelspriet

TIP: Check Ovidiu Predescu site now and then. He started working at Google's on January 22 and writes about it in his ...weblog.

You certainly could have provided a couple links, but noooo..

Here's a couple:

Sega, Sammy to Combine Operations

UPDATE 3-Sega to merge with Sammy, slashes 02/03 forecast

Sega joins Sammy:

Or just follow this crummy link for the whole pile of poop.

Seriosuly given how well things have gone with SBC's patent perhaps its time to collect prior art examples of this and post them onto /. Can anyone think of a test that (in their humble opinion) occured online and met the standards of this patent before February 11th 1999?

Don't sue eBay, sue the person.

"Roger Grace, publisher of a Los Angeles legal newspaper, sued eBay and Hollywood memorabilia dealer Tim Neeley after the Web site operator refused to remove negative comments Neeley made after selling Grace six vintage entertainment magazines."

That Murky News article had its facts a little mixed up. The real, though not as sensational (and thus not as slashdot-worthy), story is that Intel delayed the "Montecito" processor for a year so that it could make it dual-core. Read that sentence again (this means you). The original plan for Montecito was for it to be a single-core CPU. What they've just done is decided to make it dual-core and pushed back the schedule a year. Try reading a more accurate account in the EE Times.

<slashdork>Gee whiz, from my vast knowledge of the industry, I can see that Intel is going down the toilet. It takes them a whole year to design a dual-core processor! Egads!</slashdork>

...ranting about how evil Apple is because they make proprietary software and how this is inherently casts them as The Man who is trying to crush our every freedom...consider that back in October they were herealded as pretty much the only company standing up for our rights. (I can't seem to raise the page but here is the Google cache.)

It occurs to me that Apple may have less-than-evil reasons for terminating the contract, not the least of which is to retain their credibility by not becoming associated with some half-assed Napster clone.

Or, they could just be evil. I guess.

You mean the one they cancelled in July?

- A.P.

Here is an article in the San Jose Mercury News about it.

Just last week, Reuters bought and CNN published as a front page story this Amazon /Segway press release. Reuters must not employ any of those hard-driving investigative reporters we loved in old 30s movies.

For example the "story" "reports"

• "pre-orders already place the high-tech scooter in the top half percent of sales" Yeah? Each Segway costs $5000, while the average Amazon item costs maybe $50. So if Amazon sells 100 Segways in a month, it's in the same percentile as a book that sold 10,000 copies in the same month--that's pretty impressive sales for a book, pretty lousy sales for an item that got the publicity buzz Segway did, an item featured on Amazon's front page.
• "It's selling better than many of our digital cameras" Yeah? And is Amazon the only retailer selling digital cameras, the way it is the only retailer selling Segways? In fact, do you know anybody who would go to Amazon to buy a digital camera?
• "Frazier declined to provide actual pre-sale numbers" I am sure the carefully phrased hype provided is much closer to what CNN readers care about.

Some Reuters Clark Kent may have added one note of reality in the final sentence: "in San Francisco a debate is raging over whether the human transporter should be allowed on that city's streets. " That debate stopped raging a week before this press release came out. According to the Dec. 20 SF Chronicle , after extensive public discussion 9 of 11 supervisors have voted to ban the Segway, enough to overturn the mayor's veto if he decides to try one.

Well, I read a blurb in Wired about Chandler. But here is another article from Mercury News.

You can always google "kapor and chandler".

maybe an organism could be constructed from scratch.

Of course, it wasn't created from scratch, but it may be the closest thing yet, and the most fully understood non-viral life form yet (many may have heard):

New Life Form Created

your right they dont back open source at ALL

nope not backing it at all
and well your at it do me a favor and call the gnome developers and ask them if sun has thrown any money their way.

> I know because these recent actions,
> I will NEVER buy Intel ever again!

AMD's Sanders testifies on Microsoft's behalf as 'favor' to Gates

I will NEVER buy AMD again. Who's the bigger fool, the fool, or the fool who follows him?

Matthew

Here's another article also about EMI's plans for digital music online. The quote that I like is:

The product and the category we're delivering is the one they're looking for.

I swear these guys must read /.
-N

Great links ... the last paragraph of Dan Gillmore's article gets to the crux of this and many other modern problems:

The one chance is for people to realize what's at stake and do something difficult: Make choices that mean less convenience today in order to have liberty tomorrow. Americans are lousy at this, but a lot is now at stake. You may not care. You should.

Yup. Americans ARE lousy at this, at least nowadays. We are the proud, the free, willing to fight for liberty justice for all, as long as we can do it with a remote from the couch. Today's America is a golden land of opportunity for anybody who can figure out clever ways to exploit our overriding aversion to inconvenience. That's the problem. Come up with a good solution to that, and the rest is details. My great fear is that fixing our sheep-like mentality is going to take something starkly real and immediate, like guerrilla warfare in our streets or an economic depression on the scale of the 1930s.

Article on astrobiology. Somewhat related to the post here.

Dan Gillmor is on record as saying that "Apple stands firm against [the] entertainment cartel...It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel. Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy."

To which I say, "well, this region nonsense sure sounds like a restriction to me."

I'd love to believe Apple is a good guy, but I'm not sure the evidence supports it...

To do Gillmor justice, he qualified his statement in a response to my query in this Slashdot interview, in which he said (in part):

"To answer directly: I don't think Apple has an anti-DRM strategy, though, even if I wish they'd go for it. I do think Apple has a generally pro-customer stance, which is a heck of a lot better than some other companies out there. Perhaps the company is looking for some balance in a situation where the sides are turning the issue into a binary question, i.e., total control or total anarchy. Example of balance: Apple doesn't enable iPod users to copy to other disks (not directly), but it hasn't done anything as far as I know to stop the third parties who make it easy to do so.

Gateway's campaign was terrific. But Gateway is part of the Wintel ecosystem, and there's no question that Microsoft is moving fast toward a Hollywood-friendly regime that's overtly pro-DRM. When Gateway starts selling nicely configured Linux boxes and promoting them in terms of customer choice and digital freedom, I'll be even more impressed."

in the mercury news article dan gillmor refers to there's a paragraph that says "Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Davis, argues that the actual number of software jobs being shipped overseas is a fraction of the country's total. And it will remain small, he argues, because nothing beats face time at the soda machine for finishing engineering jobs right."

can someone explain to me what "face time at the soda machine" is? thx.