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According to Mixed reaction to Apple's announcement iTunes will be Dropping DRM and iTunes store and DRM: What you need to know Amazon's catalog was DRM free for a year before Apple's. Apple may have had some DRM free tracks, but their major label catalog's weren't. It's not really just the DRM that was a no go for me, but also iTunes. I don't like the program and how it worked on my system. With Amazon I have a simple download utility that is non-intrusive and I can close when I'm done downloading.

According to Mixed reaction to Apple's announcement iTunes will be Dropping DRM and iTunes store and DRM: What you need to know Amazon's catalog was DRM free for a year before Apple's. Apple may have had some DRM free tracks, but their major label catalog's weren't. It's not really just the DRM that was a no go for me, but also iTunes. I don't like the program and how it worked on my system. With Amazon I have a simple download utility that is non-intrusive and I can close when I'm done downloading.

Really? From: http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/02/19/iphone-sales-slump-q4-blackberry-surges

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker from February 2009, the data for all converged devices (i.e., smartphones) shows that Research In Motion (RIM) increased its U.S. market share from 40.4% in Q3 2008 to 47.5% in Q4. Apple, on the other hand, lost market share in the U.S., dropping from 30.1% in Q3 2008 to 22.3% in Q4.

Where do you get them having the "vast majority" of the market?

I stand by what I said. Now if you can provide a link saying Apple was also slapped with a lawsuit, I'll evaluate it in which case I may change my mind, unlike some I do change when I am convinced I was wrong. Do you?

First I need to be convinced. Saying that OS X doesn't perform badly on slow machines because no-one has filed a lawsuit, is not a convincing argument.

Okay, I'm willing to say Leopard doesn't run so well on older Macs. Are you willing to say Vista was bad? An article dated 2 June 2009, so it's not dated, says " Windows 7 already biting into Vista but XP still king". Not even out of the gate but Windows 7 looks to do doing better than Vista, Windows 7 has slowed Vista sales. I still stand by what I said, that "Vista sucks".

Falcon

"Hi Blaxthos, On slashdot: "Proper sourcing always depends on context; common sense and editorial judgment are an indispensable part of the process." In any case, there is plenty of material concerning IBM's dubious patents: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/06/ibm_paper_or_plastic_patent/ http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/03/30/ibm-applies-patent-offshoring-math http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/12/ibm_patents_sys.html;jsessionid=4BEPM0NZUXQDAQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/ibm-patent-policy-apparent.html http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2002/10/13/ibm-eliminates.html http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/03/ibm-makes-more-money-by-destorying-value.html I've assembled them all here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1227341&cid=27885503 But I don't think that a larger number of dubious patents is needed to make the case. I think one is enough. I am not biased against IBM, but I am biased against claims to have record number of patents and no wishes to see the highly dubious exposed in a NPOV. (My opinion: Society is not being improved by these patents, neither IBM.)"

In my little david vs goliath here, that's what I'm getting, and the page keeps being reverted. And here I'm thinking CowboyNeal is a reliable source...

In any case, if I lose, there are reliable sources for the "paper or plastic" patent, the "but I only had soup" patent, the offshoring patent, the "who is going to poo next" patent, the "terry is a boy, jeena is a girl" patent, etc. And here's a comment on IBM's patent schizophrenia. And here's another comment on how IBM makes money by destroying value.

I have nothing against IBM or other patent trolls, I just want them to look in the wikipedia mirror to see if they are happy with who they are. This will only stop with a big streisand.

So, you mean to say that if i want to see one pound of Kellogs' corn flakes in my one pound box, i better pay full price of one pound?
In other words, you mean that you would brand it as one-pound kellog corn flakes, but it actually contains only 1/3 pound for which i pay the price of one pound.
Now, suddenly, if i wake up and measure it, and start demanding one pound for one pound, you say i need to pay the "actual" price?
Wow!
In ancient times it was known as coin-clipping, weight-pinching and bakers' dozen. They all met the same fate: Death at the Wheel.
You say 30Mbps at $30/- a month. I say 30Mbps a month. You charge $300/- ????
I don't know how it is in US, but in India this is outlawed, and unlike US, the CEO really gets arrested for the same: http://www.thestandard.com/internetnews/002595.php/
No hiding behind the corporate veil crap here.
In Saudi Arabia it is worse.
I wish you use your funny logic in India. The Regulatory bodies here are itching for victims and politicians are looking to get elected by cracking down on corrupt companies...

There is a simple reason for that, it requires learning.

I've given this some thought, and there are several basic problems that need to be overcome with the current computer/human interface:

1 - It is not intuitive, no matter how much we as a society now accept as normal for computers

2 - computers require a special lexicon to communicate with.

3 - computers do not fix themselves: if you have a maid/servant it's ok if they are ill for a couple of days, but if you have to be the doctor too, it doesn't work well. Yes, there are computer 'doctors' but they are not able to help you when program xyz doesn't run right etc.

Anything that only propagates the current interfaces issues to a new set of actions by the user will fail ultimately.

The user interface needs to be intuitive and uncomplicated. It needs to use 'normal' methods of interfacing with humans. Speech, vision, touch... the popularity of the iPod touch screen proves this to be true.

The complexities of a typical computer OS and configuration is beyond the understanding of most end users. When something goes wrong, there is operator overload. This must be fixed to make any significant headway on the other problems. Look at scifi movies to understand more of what I'm saying.

If I had a set of cameras on my monitor, the computer could watch the motion of my hands and predict/posit that motion on the screen. If the computer understood what I was saying and talking about I would not need to type so much, or even sit at the keyboard.

If the computer itself presented information in a 3D world to the user, it would be intuitive to understand what the user needs to do. To get an idea of what I mean, think of something like SecondLife as the interface on your screen, or the window manager. On the screen is a user customized 'world' that contains 3D icons as part of it's makeup. So the user moves their avatar to their 'office' and the objects there represent those functions that the user associates with the 'office'. A trip to the 3D kitchen and touch the cook book object to open a link to recipes, both saved and on the Internet etc.

With voice recognition, simply calling to the computer and asking what goes into a dirty martini would get a voice answer, as if the user asked their SO from another room.

When the user wants to send an email, they simply dictate it to the computer, like leaving a voice message on the recipient's phone service.

These are the things that have to happen to make computers more 'user friendly'. Odd tricks like wiggling your ears won't fix it.

Take a deep breath, calm down a minute, and stop attributing malice due to not understanding fully.

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/02/16/facebook-we-have-never-claimed-ownership-members-content

If you're an investor, owning shares in a company that has almost all of, but a shrinking share of a shrinking market isn't a happy place to be, especially if they have no room for growth and are trimming their failed attempts to find new markets. Add that their flagship product is running in the single digits, their Marketing efforts are the not only the butt of much comedy but may cost more than the GDP of Haiti and you have the perfect storm.

It's more fun to be holding a company that's growing share, sales and profits too. A company that only holds 10% of its target markets. A company that can report record profits in a bloodbath holiday quarter in the middle of a dire recession? A company whose advertising is so enjoyable that it's viral. A company that's innovating and inventing new markets. That's more fun. That's a winner.

And that winner isn't MSFT. Their stock is where it was 10 years ago. Over the same period Apple is up 1000%. Unlike Microsoft they have 90% of the established market to get yet, and the prospect of undiscovered country.

/14 links? That's informative. Pretty sure you regret posting that now. Let's go again.

"The Internet, unless Australia goes Chinese on us."

  Ahem. Not that Korea is any better. I've gotten "Internet Police" notices when trying to visit adult sites.

As far as i understood detecting very slight amounts of a
particular protein also has many other uses besides
detection of cancer proteins in a clinical environment.

The whole thing already looks like a ready to use device
in the picture so i think it's pretty close
to actual applications, even if it's not approved for clinical use.

BitTorrent claims it is actually trying to reduce congestion.

A source for the quote by de Icaza.

Thank you for finding it.

How is that even possible? Isn't Mono supposed to be OSS?

Seems like it's Microsoft licensed tech QUOTE:

[Miguel] de Icaza explained that while anyone who downloaded Moonlight from Novell was protected by the company's licensing of Silverlight codecs from Microsoft through the company's own cross-licensing agreement.

Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering from Mozilla, then raised the question that if he downloads and then distributes the code for Moonlight, would he get the patent protection?

"There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell," answered de Icaza, who then acknowledged that "as to extending the patents to third parties -- you have to talk to Microsoft."

So Novell/Microsoft use software patents to remove some/most of the benefits of OSS.

I was a little confused to see this on the NYT web site, since most readers there would never have never heard of Solaris before. But this seems to be some kind of syndicated story that's appearing on a lot of other web sites. This one has an interesting post from somebody at Gracenote. Of course, his comments will be read in light of the fact that Gracenote is Evil.

A decent article, though I wish they had quoted somebody besides a Linux Foundation flack for the Solaris-Is-Dying side of the argument.

Oh, the irony:

A Catch 22 for Wikipedia: Should Deletionpedia entry be deleted?

The Slashdot thread is referenced in both the article and the Wikipedia talk page.

Ian Lamont
The Industry Standard

Then again, as a personal entity with no stake in these corporate entities, I could care less about their trademark protections.

I used to write and there's not many things that will get a published writer slapped with a lawsuit faster than to use a trademark as a verb, or in the case of Coca Cola as a pronoun for a generic drink. In my writing classes and in the writing clubs or groups I was a member of this was pretty regularly stressed. A regular person on the streets, or on /. doesn't have to be concerned but someone who writes for a living certainly does.

Anyway, just about everyone uses Google nowadays, so it's usually going to be technically correct to say "googling".

According to TFA not quite 2/3 of searches are done with Google. I wouldn't say that that's "just about everyone". I don't use Google for all of my searches either, most but not all. I also use About.com, Alta Vista, Ask.com, and Dmoz (Open Directory Project).

Falcon

What about in situation like Wikipedia where most people are volunteers. How would you send WP admins to training and etc?

How about "hidden" tracking cookies, which also shows how admins match sensitive data:
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/28/net-views-sock-puppet-tactics-wikipedia

I think you're right about MIcrosoft attempting to emulate Google. Ballmer is obsessed with Google for a very good reason: Google is eating their lunch in the search market. According to the Industry Standard, Google accounted for 69.17% of all U.S. searches for June 2008, up from 63.92% in June of last year. In the same period Yahoo's search share fell from 23.31% to 19.62%, and Microsoft's fell from 9.85% to 5.46%.

Search equates to eyeballs and Microsoft is shitting their pants at the inexorable erosion of their Web presence, especially as their other businesses mature and earnings plateau. In light of the falling search shares of both Yahoo and Microsoft, one has to wonder what possible synergy Microsoft sees in a pairing of their search businesses.

At the Industry Standard, we have a very active prediction market based on technology predictions (Examples include Nintendo announces new DS at E3 [current community consensus 25%] and Firefox 3 out of beta by summer [current community consensus 69%]). In observing the results of the prediction markets, it is very striking how accurate they are -- of the dozens which have generated significant participation, the community has been extremely accurate in terms of picking the correct outcome. This is true even well before the predictions close and the publicly reported news/facts are more definite. I was very surprised by this. I have always been skeptical of the supposed "wisdom of the crowd" but people have proven to be accurate predictors when their opinions are taken in aggregate.

At the Industry Standard, we have a very active prediction market based on technology predictions (Examples include Nintendo announces new DS at E3 [current community consensus 25%] and Firefox 3 out of beta by summer [current community consensus 69%]). In observing the results of the prediction markets, it is very striking how accurate they are -- of the dozens which have generated significant participation, the community has been extremely accurate in terms of picking the correct outcome. This is true even well before the predictions close and the publicly reported news/facts are more definite. I was very surprised by this. I have always been skeptical of the supposed "wisdom of the crowd" but people have proven to be accurate predictors when their opinions are taken in aggregate.

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/05/18/china-mourning-suspends-entertainment-web-sites

And the same thing happened in the US with companies like Rhythms. In a nut shell the people who owned the wire tripped on power cables, disconnected networks by accident. Always took day to fix and harassed Rhythms out of business. And I can say, they had good service until the games with SBC. It was good while the government assured it was fair, but decayed immediately when the government left the scene.

The real solution is to say the home owner owns the wire and _anyone_ to the pole can use it for no charge. Take away the dominance and open up competition. Make it illegal for any city to limit franchise access to less than say 4 companies. Allow wireless to the pole for rapid deployment. Make it easy to compete against these Bells and Telus companies. Maybe even broaden this up and include Rogers and Shaw.

I knew of a case in a small community where Telus said internet, ISDN was $250 mo. plus a hefty install charge. They stated they couldn't do it cheaper. Some entrepreneurs did high speed for $79 month. All of a sudden Telus could do it for $29 and put them out of business. The rates are now back up to $79 in that community. A typical story in this business. It is also why savvy investors don't invest in alternatives, they know Bell/Telus/MTS in their regions are monopolies.

If I tried to offer US satilitte TV and a wireless Internet in my neighborhood with a mesh network, how long would it be before I needed a good lawyer?

They could be looking beyond mobile gaming, if you look at their patent filing from 2006, which looks like a Wii rip-off (presumably integrated into Apple TV somehow).

I know your comment was intended to be humorous, but Microsoft called it iHD to begin with, then renamed it to HDi later. One of the articles linked in the summary actually mentions this, as does the Wikipedia article.

In other news, a molehill has become a mountain. Here's tom with the weather:

I am reminded of This 2001 train accident in Baltimore, where a tunnel fire severed a major internet backbone among other things and disrupted local communications as far away as Africa. It seems that while decentralized and robust on the massive scale, the internet is vulnerable as a child to small accidents or attacks, whose ramifications can be felt worldwide. It is too big to be defended or destroyed.

In fact when Western companies bring employment to poorer countries it's looked on as exploitation or off-shoring and they get dog's abuse anyway.

Is there no possible reason for that? Western companies go to poor countries because they can get away with giving back as very little as possible. They are not raising the living standards of the poor country to ours, they are making Western workers live down to the standards of the poor countries. In some cases, they use the workers of poor countries as disposable assets. Look a bit into mining in Africa and tell me that Western companies are doing the poor workers a solid rather than exploiting them at every turn. They also get to avoid those pesky environmental laws that prevent them from dumping the cyanide and mercury they use to seperate minerals directly into the water table.

This article touches a bit on some of the problems, but doesn't mention that many of the mining companies are partly or largely Western owned. This article (this one as well) touches on Western involvement in supplying arms to Africa. This tells us a bit more why the West supplies arms and money for civil wars in Africa.

Angry and clueless - you fit the /. profile well.

1] This article that you indirectly linked to through Google states pretty clearly that you are delusional:

Gracenote.com ... filed a lawsuit Thursday against Roxio, maker of the most popular CD-burning software on the market, alleging patent and trademark infringement, as well as breach of contract.

Where does it mention the DMCA? The first article doesn't mention it either as far as I can tell. But I wouldn't believe an article anyway. I would check the court filings before making such bold claims.

2] You didn't find evidence of a lawsuit against freedb or anyone associated with freedb development.

3] You think the index collisions in the old CDDB service are a problem? Funny, that. Perhaps that's why Gracenote abandonded it, do you suppose? And perhaps that's why freedb sux so hard.

My, you are an angy individual.

Creative saw strong demand in all regions for its MP3 players and achieved sales of 2 million MP3 players for the second quarter in a row

You're thinking of the Digiscents iSmell:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-odor1.htm

Folded in April 2001:

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23654,00 .html

Heh. Funny you should mention that. I was a senior sensory scientist at DigiScents and I had a working iSmell prototype on my desk.

And in my opinion, the spent brass smell we had was one of our five best smells. I think the official name was gunsmoke, but man, it smelled just like a spent shell casing.

Ironically, DoD wanted to pay us some reasonably sized chunk of money to develop 6 smells for their simulators, but our management guys never followed up because they were too busy trying to hit the dot-com homerun instead of winning the game with RBIs and stand up doubles.

People die everyday over Cat5e.

*cough*

Maybe you should read more about the coltan trade before you laugh off people dying for metals used in high-tech goods. Tantalum is widely used in electrolytic capacitors, and illegal trade in it has helped fuel warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo back before a ceasefire was brokered in 2003.

Fortunately, a lot of companies did what was right and boycotted the trade during the war, but the native people today are still being exploited to mine the material (and many other precious minerals) with little material benefit to themselves and their families.

See kerberos. Hopefully the nature of XML can prevent this.

It's true, Microsoft uses the GPL

http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27511,00 .html

Their "tools for Unix" is under the GPL. Interix and other migration tools are under the GPL, the intent is to make it easy to move to Microsoft products. I believe they got the idea from DCon Roach motels.

At the end of 2004, roughly 94 million people in China had Internet access, where an Internet user was anyone who averaged over an hour a week on the Internet. So, we're actually talking just shy of 10% of all Chinese Internet users.

you know of any articles talking about their legal action? I'm trying to find some more info about this...like a legitimate article or document regarding their legal actions against another company. I found this but it doesnt look very professional. No references and I cant find this anywhere else.

From this article:

While BPL has the potential to serve 13 million U.S. households in the next three to five years, interference problems and a reluctance from many electric companies to offer new services may slow its development, said Barry Goodstadt, vice president at market research firm Harris Interactive Inc.

13 million homes are a "potential" in 3 to 5 years. Comcast has 21.5 million "potential" subscribers right now. I have a feeling that telcos have several million more "potential" subscribers... Yet I don't see telcos rushing out to give competive DSL and I certainly don't see Comcast rushing out to give HSD service to every end of their market.

You think that this technology is going to be any different? I don't.

I'd be willing to bet money the timing of both this release and the previous was carefully planned to mollify some states public service utilities or some bill being reviewed in Congress.

Perhaps http://www.thestandard.com/internetnews/000850.php /

Ah bah, i should have added marktplaats.nl got bought by eBay .

Uh. First note that Linux is distributed under the GPL, a license from the Free Software Foundation. With that in mind, note that IDC forcasts that Linux will be a $35 Billion market.

Intel made more profit off of it's RedHat investment than it's largest competitor (AMD) made in a decade.

Sure you weren't trolling?

Museums and galleries have already been using regular iPods as tour guides, example, so with a color screen to display the artwork at the same time, this seems a natural fit.

There is one respect in which Austin is going wireless: Verizon is offering citywide wireless coverage for Austin. However, this wireless access is neither fast nor free; the proposed price is $80 a month, and the speed is 300-500 kbits/sec down, 50 kbps/sec up. Therefore, this is yet another case of an individual business offering a sort of wireless access, but they claim to cover an entire city, and they charge.

"By collecting URLs, A9.com tracks and collects a record of users' web browsing activity within and across websites. A9.com also collects and stores other user information you give A9.com"

The former Dotcom Bible, The Industry Standard, has returned with daily news and Guest Blogs. The assumption that the Internet has fundamentally changed business is still true, perhaps more true today than before the crash. Somebody needs to chronicle this story again.

The Industry Standard reports, 'The U.K. government has signed a five-year agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc. to potentially offer the company's new Java Desktop System (JDS) and Java Enterprise System (JES) software to public sector agencies as part of an overall open source push.'

From TheStandard.com: "The RIAA's campaign has also drawn criticism, particularly its attempts to force Internet service providers (ISPs) to disclose personal information about subscribers suspected of being illegal downloaders."

A good piece from Grant Gross of the IDG News Service posted on TheStandard.com... "But others at the forum questioned whether VoIP vendors would include services for the disabled, for example, or pay access fees for connecting to the traditional phone network if not required by the FCC. Access fees now charged throughout the telecommunications industry help keep some small telephone service providers in business, said Carl Wood, a commissioner with the California Public Utilities Commission. But other participants questioned if VoIP providers should have to pay access fees if they route an entire telephone call by IP, instead of using part of the public switched telephone network."

DoubleClick's entire business model is based on gross invasion of what little privacy we have left, intensive data mining, consumer profiling, spamming, etc., ad nauseum. Far as I'm concerned, they deserve this!

Some examples: In 1998, the spammed Princeton U, trolling for job candidates. In June of 2003, DoubleClick announced their own so-called anti-spam initiatives that, according to the article, will "focus on finding out how consumers identify spam, to give marketers a better idea of how they can avoid being unfairly singled out as spammers." (For the record, spam is any E-mail received that tries to sell you something or, in the case of political spam, get your vote, and that you did not ask for).

Want more? No problem. In 2001, DoubleClick two unnamed E-mail marketing companies to, according to a quote in the article from CBS's Market Watch, "increase its junk e-mail capabilities."

Still not convinced? How about this thread over at the Firewall-Wizards site from 1999?

In summary, it looks like DoubleClick has long attempted to redefine spam as "That Which We Do Not Do." It also appears that their ethics are questionable at best, especially in light of those FUI banners on web pages.

DoubleClick, if you're reading this... You brought it on yourselves, and you have nothing but your own shady practices to blame. May you go down in a nice, pretty set of multicolored flames, and may the ashes be used as space filler for the next five Great Deconstructed Architectural Makeovers in FunFun Town. Nick Danger could probably use a new office...