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Malaria?

That was for Kansas: Butler Community College, Cowley County Community College, Hutchinson Community College and Wichita Area Technical College.

Once again someone has stolen my original concept. Several companies (Loudeye/Overpeer for one) are selling this type of service to the major labels so now someone has probably sold a BitTorrent version to the major movie studios (major labels = major studios in most cases anyway). Too bad I didn't attempt to patent the concept back in 2000.

Yahoo OWNS Intermix through Overture who has lost some massive court cases involving spyware. So this is no real surprise. Intermix was ordered to pay 7.5 Million in a seattle case. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/43894.html

Slashdot: Speculation for Half-wits.

But I guess it may work in some cases. I bet these guys making headlines for getting retaliated against sometime soon.

An interesting article over at TechNewsWorld about how Blue Frog is not what we need in the battle against spam. "It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's Web sites are illegal."

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/44340.html

or

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050702/fob7. asp

we get a space wasting dupe.

Smooth move, zonk.

AC

It's already been shown that the record industry is not losing money because of p2p. That's accepted as fact by everyone who's looked at the numbers except the RIAA, because admitting that efffectively admits that they were wrong in the first place. Regardless, I believe in the inherent goodness of most people and that people will pay for what they feel is worth their money. I don't download music via p2p very often but when I do, it's to decide whether or not I want to buy music or not. I've purchased many CDs recently directly because of songs I downloaded and liked.

Maybe Villasante should get together with Enderle and decide whose FUD to believe.

The ISS can only dock one shuttle at a time. Discovery would stay there, and be remotely undocked prior to Atlantis getting there.

Seems someone else has thought of this:
"If Discovery were damaged during launch or in orbit, Mission Control would determine whether the shuttle is capable of safely bringing the crew home. If not, the astronauts would be forced to take refuge aboard the space station and wait five weeks for Atlantis and its crew of four to come get them.
The damaged shuttle would have to be jettisoned before a rescue vehicle could arrive, because the station cannot accommodate two shuttles. Mission Control would command Discovery to unlock from the station and fire its steering jets, which would send the vehicle plunging down into the atmosphere. If all went as planned, the remnants would splash into the Pacific Ocean far from any land."

For those who don't know:

Laura DiDio calls Linux code a "copy and paste" of SCO's code.

Laura DiDio is advising customers not to dismiss SCO's licensing offer. "The customers who received these 1,500 letters from SCO have been told this isn't going anywhere," DiDio told TechNewsWorld. "I don't think anyone should listen to such empty assurances."

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/41942.html Good article on this April Fools joke.

"Note to the RIAA/MPAA: profit from P2P, instead of trying to fight it."

Great idea, but I think they're a bit ahead of you:

Mashboxx and Pay P2P

Grokster, Sony, BMG to do legit P2P service?

Bertelsmann to offer P2P download platform

And while not strictly P2P:

Universal Music Debuts Digital-Only Label

"People are literally foaming at the mouth to get their hands on it," he said. "It will likely take the place of the iPod as the next cool thing."

Rob Enderle has called all Linux users "terrorists". He also publically claimed that Linux users were likely to assassinate (yes, that's right, MURDER) SCO executives over to the lawsuit. He is not personally a company, but the company he runs (The Enderle Group) HAS been paid by Microsoft to shill for them in the past.

I said back in the early 80's that Japanese would be an excellent language to learn, due to the great amount of commerce between Japan and the USA. (Note today: Sony picks an american as it's new CEO)

I'd suggest chinese, whichever dialect is prevalent on the mainland for business.

That's true, Blockbuster's "no late fees" thing is false advertising. That's why the Attorney General of New Jersey is suing blockbuster.

Palmsource has decided that the next version of Palm will be based on Linux. So soon the major OSes for PDAs will be Windows and Linux (plus symbian). Personally, I have the Zaurus c760, and think it is great. Having the ability to use the huge library of linux software for the device is great (i run pdaXrom, so X-ware can mostly be made to work). I just wish Sharp or others would get their fingers out and offer more selections and market it better. -TN

Sounds almost malaprop. "It works, I threatened to rip a copy of Ghostbusters II onto my HD and I heard a tiny scream! My spyware aragorn!"

However the paper admits that the only way to be sure that you have killed a kernel rootkit is to completely erase an infected hard drive and reinstall the operating system from scratch.

That sounds rather drastic. How about drilling a hole through it, smashing it with a sledgehammer and throwing it into the Tiber while you're at it? Microsoft seems to be making a stronger case all the time for not exposing a Windows PC to the internet. Maybe it is time to look at a Mac.

Microsoft's XBox Firewire

Ok, so the whole article seemed to pivot around the notion that the biggest problem Microsoft has is that consumers are not upgrading their software fast enough to improve current market returns. Yes, "Many organisations are still using Office '97 - an 8 year old release - and see no compelling reason to upgrade."

Organizations are using Microsoft products, and are not switching (to other Microsoft products). Sounds like a net zero change in market share to me.

Yes, Linux is expected to close in on Windows in a couple of years. From a 90% dominance today, to a projected 58% dominence. Oh yeah, only if you count dominance on PDAs. You see, Microsoft has 48.1% of the PDA market in Q3 2004, with Palm at #2 at 29.8%, and is expected to decline.

In the browser usage stats, Microsoft is dropping, with a 64.9% share, compared to up and coming FireFox at 20%. The problem is, FireFox looks like it hasnt gained any share since it peaked in Nov 2004. That's the best I could find for FireFox, since other studies put Microsoft's Internet Explorer at around 92.9 % dominance worldwide. Its very hard to get any two companies to agree on stats, because they're both approaching the question with different agendas.

But desktops, well, the statistics for Microsoft and Linux are all over the place. Last spring, Microsoft had 93% of the worldwide desktop market in their corner, but was still fighting (in Jan 2004) the business side to upgrade to the latest and greatest MS products. Microsoft really starts to cry in the server market, where IBM via Linux are barrelling through to win. Except Microsoft still has 59% of the server market, 3:1 today and 2:1 on projected Linux share. This was one of the few business statistic sites that actually had hard numbers, and even there, desktop stats appear pretty stale.

In conclusion, from browsing through Google, people have been making these same claims on market share dominance since 2001, "Linux is the up and comer, watch out!" and noone seems to ever back up their sides with hard numbers... nothing that actually shows a survey on how Windows:Linux ratios that actually shows Linux having a chance... every year, "we're coming to get you, this year is our year!" Maybe its because for all the talk, Linux really is a niche market after all...

Linux on Intel: Think Dead Man Walking and Grid vs. SMP: The Empire Tries Again and Fast, Faster and IBM's PlayStation 3 Processor.

Linux on Intel: Think Dead Man Walking and Grid vs. SMP: The Empire Tries Again and Fast, Faster and IBM's PlayStation 3 Processor.

Linux on Intel: Think Dead Man Walking and Grid vs. SMP: The Empire Tries Again and Fast, Faster and IBM's PlayStation 3 Processor.

The US is widely known to habor cyber-criminals (56% of spammers, according to the Washington Times, 86% according to TechWorldNews). Should they also be suspect of wire-tranfers to US entities? Is this a case of "everyone else does worse things so ignore our indiscretions"? Saying BOA is responsible for this guy's fuck up is like saying Ford is responsible when some dumbass leaves his keys in the ignition of his unlocked car and it gets stolen. This case will ge thrown out. If I was BOA I'd countersue for legal fees.

No, I'm not grousing about my rejected submission of the same story... much ;)

NPR's Morning Edition had a short story on this as well: Brazil Makes Move to Open Source Software. The audio has been posted, too. It's not a deep look at open source economics, but it does make the point about Microsoft's main concern of Brazil's actions lending credence to other governments following suit. BillG has requested a meeting with da Silva to discuss it (again... they met in 2002). And, it's nice to see the topic discussed in mainstream media.

When the side of the head where the phone was held was taken into consideration, the tumor risk was almost four times higher for the side where the phone was held and normal for the other side.

• general rise in cell phone use should have corresponding rise in these neuromas but that is not observed.
• Only analog phone use was studied but most cell phone use now is digital
• The neuroma in question is typically so slow growing that many people carry them around undiagnosed for years. [i.e. if they had done the expensive MRI scan on the 600 "healthy" control subjects, they might have to adjust their numbers]
• A well identified genetic defect is known to cause the neuromas spontaneously

" It has never really been about music being freely traded. These attacks on p2p is purely a way to stop minor labels from growing and up and coming musicians from doing it on their own."

I think that's too much of a generalization. I've met owners of indie labels who are anti-piracy. If a major loses 10% of their business to piracy, it's just a few layoffs or salary freezes here and there. If you run an indie label, you're paying yourself $20,000 a year, and your income drops 10% due to piracy, it might mean firing one of the six people who work for you, somebody whom you know very well. And from what I've read on the web sites of the various indie record label trade groups, their goal is to have better representation on iTunes, not Kazaa.

Either way, there are tons of outlets on the web for unsigned bands and small labels to get the their stuff out. The traffic of pirated MP3s on the P2P networks tends to mirror the sales in stores. Most people who use Kazaa are there for the latest Eminem or Usher, not some unsigned garage deathcore band from Wisconsin.

"If the cost of production approachs zero, then musicians will not need labels. As it is, the major labels are making as much money as ever before."

Slashdotters have been saying, in effect, "the big labels are history once all the bands discover that the mighty power of the Internet is all they need" for five years now. Meanwhile, companies like Magnatune (which many Slashdotters see as the right way to sell music online) are struggling, while iTunes just hit its 200 millionth download, Universal has launched a digital only label, and Apple and the record companies are having the last laugh. Slashdotters often claim that the record companies just don't get this whole Internet thing, but it seems to me that they get it just fine. Perhaps all it will take is another five years for the Internet to put the record labels out of business, but before that will happen, somebody will need to tell the record labels to stop using the Internet to their advantage.

While many bands who can't get, or don't want a recording contract have used the Internet as a promotional and distribution vehicle, finding success is much, much more than getting the cost of production to zero. The Internet and the P2P will not:

• pay for your studio time, or pay for the gear for you to build your own studio
• pay for an engineer who can make you sound good
• pay for session musicians
• pay for the cost of encoding your music and going through the hurdles of getting it onto iTMS
• send a copy of your song to every radio station in the country, and follow up with phone calls to pester them to play your track
• make the phone calls and pay the costs necessary for your tour
• pay to get you featured on the home page of Amazon.com and the download sites

Meanwhile, a record label will.

The Internet is great, but it's not the universal panacea.

The second link was actually this:
The MyDoom Effect: Crossing the Line into Terrorism
(I fell into the long-post temptation again..)

So I have some more links for y'all.

Technology News' Report and PCWorld's Article on the new disc that will contain a backwards-compatible (4.6 GB) DVD layer and a higher definition (15 GB) HD-DVD layer of which production is planned to begin in October or November of next year.

This seems like this could be a major factor in the format war between HD-DVD and the higher capacity Blu-ray.

Actually IBM has a lot of call centers in both countries - do a search on google and you'll find plenty of articles like this one > http://www.technewsworld.com/story/33346.html.

IBM doesn't just run call centers for their tech support on their own products. They used to do all the helpdesk support for Nortel a long time ago for instance (note: I only know this because while working at Stream for a totally different contract a customer incisted I stay on the line while they call their help desk involving a printer problem with the product I did support)

This is my last rejected submission on climate change - posted anonymously to avoid karma-whornig accusations.

New evidence of climate change unprecedented in human history seems to arrive almost every day. Two new studies have added more data to the mountain of evidence supporting the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis. A UN Environmental Program report shows that the world faces a 'staggering threat', with the Arctic already being severely affected, with thawing of much of the sea ice and the Greenland icecap predicted.

The extinction of polar bears and seals seems likely. Worse, the decrease is salinity will affect the thermohaline pump that drives the North Atlantic drift, potentially stopping the Gulf Stream and reducing Europe to an icy wilderness. But it's not all bad news - the reduced ice cover will open new areas for gas and oil extraction!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the planet, Nature reports that the respected British Antarctic Survey has shown that loss of sea ice has causedAntarctic Krill populations to crash; this is the probable cause of crashing populations of various species, including the Gentoo penguin. (BAS press release here.) Sceptical readers may be interested to note that the US government now accepts that human CO2 emissions are causing climate change.

From the Technology News version of this story, "nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo."

From the Technology News version of this story, "nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo."

Not only is no one doing it. But this nobody certainly doesn't expect to duplicate the success of the Virginia Tech Big Mac.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/36324.html/

Le rayon cosmique qui a touché la mémoire d'une des urnes électroniques de Schaerbeek, ce rayon cosmique permettra de sensibiliser des députés encore acquis au vote électronique. ... An electronic voting machine error in a May, 2003, election in Belgium produced just over 4,100 more votes for the winner than there were eligible voters.
The official review reduced this to exactly 4,096 extra votes and was therefore able to conclude that .... a cosmic ray perfectly timed and directed to smite the memory cell holding the 13th bit of the total for the microsecond it was stored prior to printing.

I stopped taking supplements after reading this article a few weeks ago. Here's an excerpt:
Careless use of vitamins, taken by millions in the belief that they promote good health, could be causing thousands of premature deaths.
A study investigating whether antioxidant vitamin supplements can prevent cancer found that rather than saving lives they seemed to increase overall risk of death.
Although the effect was small, it amounted to 9,000 premature deaths among every million supplement users.
Food for thought.

I'll see your ICMLA study, and raise you a University of North Carolina and Harvard Business School economic study that says p2p exchanges make people buy more music.

Quoteth the article:
"While 65 percent of users say downloading led them to not purchase an album, 80 percent claim they bought at least one album after first sampling it on a filesharing network," researchers wrote. "The net effect is reported to be positive."

Researchers, who also observed actual P2P use, added that since some 5,000 downloads would be required to displace a single album sale, the effect of file-sharing is insignificant and indistinguishable from zero.

The study also showed file-sharing has a differential impact across sales categories -- meaning that high-selling albums actually benefit from file-sharing.

"While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of filesharing," the report added.

Filesharers and CD buyers populations overlap. I agree with your saying that these people aren't RIAA's customers for the specific albums they were sharing, but they _are_ losing profit and hurting potential customers by attacking them.

From TFA:

However, Ballmer conceded it isn't going to be an easy battle to win. "Most people still steal music," he said.

Most people steal music? This informal poll might suggest a different story.

I'd love to know what numbers he's using to arrive at his assertation that "most people" still steal music. I seem to remember reading that many people have stopped downloading music from P2P sources - they don't "still steal music," do they?

I don't know, it sounds like he's making a blanket statement to support his position without telling us how he intends to back his statement up. Perhaps he doesn't intend to?

Microsoft gets sued again for infringing on SPX Netmeeting software patents.

Sony is now supporting MP3 in their players. Not because angry Slashdotters want it, but because the public realizes that MP3 is the lingua franca of digital music:

"MP3 is the ultimate in terms of inter-device compatibility," Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told TechNewsWorld. "One of the most important things for consumers is portability and transferability and you are lacking in any of those areas with the proprietary formats."

The ideal online music store would sell tracks that users can play on all their digital music players: portables, handheld computers, car head units, cell phones, DVD players, and PCs. That means MP3, or possibly unencrypted WMA.

Something is not _inherently_ wrong with a law when the majority of the nation is made criminal by it.

Hmm, perhaps I should qualify that a bit. Democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner after all.

There is another possibility, that being that the majority of the nation is either too ignorant or apathetic to consciously concern themselves with the long term consequences of their actions

Oh, I couldn't agree more here. Though I wouldn't say ignorance is entirely the fault of those affected. Apathy is also a problem, but people need someone to enlighten them before they are motivated, hence we are back to ignorance. Ignorance in turn is rooted in the fact that multinational media corporations benefit from the ignorance of the populace in this case. If school children have a really good teacher they *might* learn a little about the subject. More likely however, they'll end up in the MPAA classroom. For most voting adults, the nightly news is their primary source of information about current events. They have jobs to keep them occupied and find little time for personal enlightenment. Ignorance is a problem, and the result of a deeper problem: One sided propaganda.

and the true reasons behind the law in the first place.

I think I've covered that part: The RIAA says unchecked file sharing will cause catastrophic failure for the record industry, yet the exact opposite has occurred.

We do not need a law against file sharing, because file sharing is not damaging anyone's business in a significant way.

or did anyone else read that headline as 'Extended Rot13 Expected December 14'?

I was thinking that maybe folks had decided to use Rot13 as a replacement for MD5, or something.

Now that I think about it, that headline probably would probably read 'Rkgraqrq EbgX Rkcrpgrq Qrprzore 14' . . .

Right! Here's something else to consider...in the past, when you had an application people might want to evaluate before they committed time and money to buying the full product, what did you do if it required a database and you were concerned your clients may not have an existing database implementation? Exactly...you included the free MSDE engine so people didn't have to go out and spend money on MS SQL or Oracle for what was only an evaluation. If it worked out well and the customer bought the software, they now had a database which, if MSDE wasn't up to snuff for a full production deployment, could be painlessly migrated to MS SQL. The engine is exactly the same, so no translation is necessary.

This worked out so well, precisely because MSDE was free to redistribute and easy to migrate to MS SQL, that MSDE is now included with thousands of applications. And remember -- if you ever outgrow its limitations, it can be directly moved over to MS SQL.

Coincidentally, MS SQL (which, as everyone is ecstatic to be able to point out, used to be Sybase) continues to gain market share. Sybase (see above) does not.

The big three at the moment in terms of market share are Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Oracle is #1 but is slowly losing market share to IBM and MS. Sybase is #4 -- but that #4 translates to 3.6%. And it's static -- they're not gaining any of that market share being lost by Oracle.

Don't get me wrong, but I love when someone says Microsoft will patent XML.

You mean like this? You can read some terms here.

Patenting plain text (like XML) is the most stupid idea I've ever heard of.

XML isn't plain text.

demonstrating their amazing abilities to stick their foot in it over and over, all whilst portraying themselves as great enforcers of the american way , and upholders of the capitalistic lifestyle that we all hold so dear. I smell an oscar. Maybe Darl will want to take his newfound fame and fortune to the next level, by becoming a rockstar too.

Umm, Linux is used for far more then the web market. Linux has been growing from 50% - 80% or so per quarter for the past few years. It has been the fastest growing server OS for a good 3 years now. MS Windows does currently have a larger market share, though it is nothing close to the desktop market share MS has. Linux server usage is not that far behind MS Windows server usage and could catch up in 2 or 3 years.
Linux Use Show Continued Growth
Linux Servers Lead Market in Worldwide Growth
Novell's product has been on a very steep downard spiral, it is not keeping anyone on MS Windows now. That is why Novell bought SuSE Linux and Ximain and are coming out with a bunch of Enterprise Linux based products.

"...arguably the best laptop display currently on the market," said Rob Enderle, an independent industry analyst with The Enderle Group.

This thing has GOT to suck now, if Enderle likes it! Some Enderle-isms:

"I have a hard time seeing the Linux Zealots as any different from terrorists"

"The biggest myths about Microsoft are that its desktop products are overpriced, it doesn't respect its customers, and reliability and security are poor"

"So I called SCO and personally found that they did have evidence."

But some people seem to be of the opinion that too many patches would be confusing.

"Ballmer said one key improvement will be a simplification of the way patches are distributed. Microsoft plans to move to a monthly patch release schedule, which he said will make it easier for network administrators to plan updates, which often require system shutdowns before installation."