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Correct. Apple is a business and it's trying desperating to hold on to it's trendiness as iPod fever dies off.


Yup... definitely dying off... what with iPod sales [growing] to 6.61 million units, up 616 per cent year-over-year

Clicky for printer-friendly version. It will probably try to print the page as well.

PS The 'perma-link' option does not appear to work yet.

Longhorn changes we do know about seem more desktop related than server - like UI changes (red instead of blue screens of death) or human-frendlyness changes (like acknowledging that it's no longer "My Computer" since they want to control it).

Yet Microsoft claims it's better for servers, more secure, etc. than XP.

This leaves me with only one possible conclusion. Microsoft already has a better-than-XP-for-servers OS in house, and that's Win2000. I bet the real longhorn strategy is to simply rebrand Win2000, but surely they can't do that while W2K is still supported or people would notice. By ending support now we'll all forget how great Win2K was by the Longhorn ship date in 2009.

The other interesting figure is that Linux server sales are up 35.2% That's kick ASS.

However, sales are completely unrelated to install base. Many machines sold with Windows end up running F/OSS sooner or later. We saw that in the late 90's, too. It's still difficult to get OEMs to supply white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. It's still difficult to get the MBAs or MSCEs in charge of ordering to order white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. And often it's fastest delivery to just bite the bullet and pay the MS tax.

So - a large number of MS' sales can be attributed to people who are going to be using the hardware for Linux. In other cases, if the new box gets used for Windows, then the old box gets wiped and then uses Linux from then on, thus an indirect increase in Linux.

....yet again. Buying up content companies is seriously damaging Sony's hardware market. All attempts at making decent hardware get screwed by the media division insisting on locking up everything Sony hardware plays...
Want a multi-region DVD player? Don't buy a Sony. No hidden menus to manage the region, you have to get the player chipped.
Want an ebook reader? Sony have a Librié: nice hardware, apart from the small detail that books that you've paid for evaporate after a few weeks, by design
Then there's the minidisk. Didn't I see something about someone recording his kid's birth/first steps/whatever, then finding out the player refused to let him copy the files....
Playstation? They want to keep all the software locked up
Sony's hardware business is bigger than its media division. Why does the media division decide what the hardware will do? Until they see sense, don't buy Sony.

Until radio Internet access forms an uninterrupted coverage area, Internet radio will be relocatable, not truly "mobile". Like the difference between a "luggable" KayPro PC and a Palm Pilot, only convenient mobility will be palatable to the masses (not just geeks, early adopters, and scattered specialists). That limitation means not only that cost will remain prohibitive until industrial scales are marketable, but that the network won't really be populated enough to really be social - except as an echo chamber of the same hackers and antisocial worker drones we've already got on Slashdot ;). That might have been better for Usenet, before AOL piped into the Internet, but the path to riches and humanization runs right through the washed masses.

WiFi (and its descendants) will be just the place to settle down, or breathe free. But hotspots will be spotty for some time, as our society's P2P buildout continues inexorably, but unplanned. The way this environment will reach a basic mobility platform includes interspot coverage by barely-adequate 3G "phone" networks, with roaming among them and hotspots, interchangeably. Motorola has announced a WLAN/GSM roamer due by Q32005. BT promises a WiFi/GSM "phone" by Q42005, and is launching a Bluetooth/GSM project. These vendors are trying to both extend cell/PCS service to enterprise WLANs (SCCAN), and roam VoWLAN connections to cell/PCS networks (UMA). And the IEEE already has a new "WiFi" descendant, WMM, that promises better roaming and QoS over the WLANs, for seamless telephony interop.

The upshot for devices like this cute little inFusion Internet radio is popularity well beyond shoppers at ThinkGeek. Which bigger global market means cheaper devices, easier to use, and more jobs for geeks. But it also means a bigger audience for content, within which niche producers can find supporting consumer scale for even the least popular content. So the leveled multimedia playing field can support people who tie other people together across the globe. Let's get it on!

From MSFT:

OneCare provides antivirus support, anti-spam filtering and firewall protection, automated hard drive cleaning and back-up, and an update notification service.

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1163024

Also from WinHEC, samsung is not the only player. The disk will be manufactured initially by Samsung, Hitachi and Seagate, and other manufacturers will be announced later.

More details on Samsung's OneNAND hybrid technology:

OneNAND Flash memory has been incorporated into the design of Microsoft Corp.'s prototype Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), the first fully functional disk drive to combine NAND-based Flash with rotating storage media.

The hybrid hard drive prototype uses 1 Gigabit OneNAND(TM) Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer. In the hybrid write mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for the majority of the time, while data is written to the Flash write buffer. When the write buffer is filled, the rotating drive spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive.

The hybrid drive saves power by keeping the spindle motor in idle mode almost all the time, while the operating system writes to the OneNAND write buffer. Moreover, by using OneNAND Flash with hard disk drive technology, disk drive performance is not compromised relative to conventional disk drives. This is due, in large part, to OneNAND's ultra-fast read speeds, which can be fully leveraged during the flushing of the contents of OneNAND's write buffer to the rotating drive. In addition, since the Samsung hybrid disk drive operates at a lower temperature than traditional rotating media, it greatly reduces the possibility of shock and impact damage, improving the overall reliability of the disk subsystem.

While the cost of hybrid disk drives may slightly increase with the addition of OneNAND, any increase will be mitigated by several factors, including lower maintenance costs, 95 percent power savings when the disk is not spinning, faster boot time and substantially increased reliability. All of these changes are crucial to the ever increasing needs of today's mobile customer, making it likely that hybrid hard drive technology will enjoy rapid market adoption.

Don't forget that they're also stripping down the much-hyped Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). Longhorn is looking more underwhelming with each press release.

It's got a lot of strikes against it:

• It was late
• Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2, including some of Microsoft's own
• It's been known to be
• unstable
• Difficult to install
• Additions like the firewall have serious shortcomings
• It messes with settings and permissions
• Is still vulnerable anyway in many ways, and it can take weeks or months to force a repair or even admission.
• Doesn't fix or remove MSIE
• Has DRM features that let spammers 0wn the machine

http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/159903411

It might not be complete sharing, but it IS available.

Plus, there's the code from whoever cracked into Microsoft's development servers:

http://www.crn.vnunet.com/news/1152775

If the EU grants immunity (and maybe a big amount of Euros) to whoever gives them the code, I'm sure they could get their hands on it.

All this really points out is how ephemeral a "retail" software developer's business model really is. If the government doesn't prop such a business model up, then there's really nothing that the company can do to control their "product" once it leaves their immediate control.

Considering even Microsoft IE6 does not have a 90% market share anymore that doesn't include them either.

I can't find much information. Is Goodle purging all the cache? I could almost swear that Intel was livid with the AMD k6 architecture using "MMX", as well as Cyrix using its own mimic/derivative or different media extentions.

reported by vnunet.com, and here's the case documents when Intel tried to sue AMD to stop using the 386 microcode.

I can't find it. There's somthing on the tip of my tongue that occured way back in 1999 or a year or two earlier that I can't seem to pronounce. It couldn't be the DEC Alpha IP purchases plit between Intel and AMD or was that such? The DEC Alpha ev6 bus was used by the earliest AMD Athlons, but I don't think that was the dispute.

Writing a worm does not make you a criminal any more than building a bomb makes you a criminal. It all depends on what you do with it, and perhaps your intent at the time.

Facts:
Lord Sainsbury is a billionaire.
Lord Sainsbury has a holding in a company that owns a key biotech patent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/442072.stm/

It seems he supports the current draft of the CIID http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160069/ Don't waste your breath on him.

Nonsense. Sun's leadership developed a license that is almost GPL-like, yet they purposely went out of their way in making it incompatible with the GPL. This is a clear sign of contempt for the GPL. It may be too late for them to switch their other products over to this license, they'd lose all credibility, but if they could they would. They still aren't able to articulate a defense for their action, only that they don't see the big deal. This from a company that uses the GPL in other open source products. Most open source advocates haven't missed the message on this one.

...they are the largest commercial donator of code under GPL. We have discussed OpenOffice in detail but Sun has also made huge donations to NetBeans, Grid Engine and a whole host of other GPL or GPL compatible projects.

Don't confuse market tactics against a dangerous monopolistic rival (MS Office, Visual Studio) to be approval or acceptance of a license. Sun is fully aware which license is more effective (BSD or GPL) against M$, and have used it strategically. But, Sun's leadership is not how you make them out to be. They are the opposite. They could have easily made their license compatible with the GPL rather than exclude it, but they didn't.

= 9J =

I heard the speech, Martin Fink said it was his opinion that there were too many licenses and not OSI's opinion. I don't remember him saying that OSI would do this, but as a member of the board of OSDL he would be asking them to do so.

I think the article explains it better than either of the articles posted above.

For his part, OSI's Nelson said that he is still studying the issue. The OSI could set tougher standards for approving open-source licenses to discourage groups from creating their own....

One idea that Nelson has considered is to have a tiered system of open-source license certifications. A "gold" license would apply to the top four or five licenses that are used in the great majority of open-source projects, he said, and a "silver" license would those that are used by fewer projects, such as the Apache Software License.

In the meantime, leave the SmartPhones to the rest of us who crave such an amalgamation of devices.

How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count.

So, you don't actually know, then? How can you criticise them meaningfully if you don't know?

According to Secunia, MSIE 5.5 has had 55 so far with 10 remaining unpatched.
MSIE 6 has had 76 so far with 20 remaining unpatched, 98% are remote exploits.

SP2 was supposed to fix many things, but it was as as difficult as a major OS upgrade, just ended up breaking many things, not fixing much and not really fixing what it claimed to fix. Granted, it's slightly more than purely a PR move, but not by much. However, it burned up valuable staff time that could have otherwise been used to evaluate competing products. The delay doesn't help MS' claim of prioritizing security much either.

It's common knowledge that MS products just aren't designed with security in mind, but if you want details, then look it up.

The article refers to another vunet article, Linux Fights Off Hackers by Iain Thomson, which refers a whitepaper published by the Honeynet Project. It really looks as though McGrath is claiming that the Honeynet Project's data has been falsified.

From the Honeynet white paper,

"By combining the data from all of the Linuxsystems deployed, we see a mean life expectancy of 3.0 months for systems that were compromised. For systems still uncompromised, we see a mean of 4.46 months. Finally, for the entire population of machines, we see a mean time of survival,including those still uncompromised: 4.1 months. The longest surviving Linux honeypot was an unpatched Red Hat 7.3 system that was online (and never compromised) for over 9 months. This is a dramatic increase from the life expectancy for default Linux systems of 72 hours seen in 2001/2002.",

as well as

"This life expectancy is all the more surprisingwhen compared to vulnerable Win32 systems.Data from the Symantec Deepsight ThreatManagement System indicates a vulnerableWin32 system has life expectancy notmeasured in months, but merely hours. Thelimited number of Win32 honeypots we havedeployed support this, several beingcompromised in mere minutes. However, wedid have two Win32 honeypots in Brazil onlinefor several months before being compromisedby worms."

and

"Meanwhile, the time to live for unpatchedWin32 systems appears to continues todecrease. Such observations have beenreported by various organizations, includingSymantec [1], Internet Storm Center[2] andeven USAToday[3]. "

Methinks that is just spreading more Microsoft misconceptions. Bill should take responsibility for his insecure stuff through obscurity, rather than dis Linux.

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160588

I can manage to keep Microsoft products secure, but only with 3rd party software as MSFT doesn't seem to care since they don't have to make up for the business losses.

If they actually stood behind thier product, they would (but I think he knows it would bankrupt him.

If stupid people don't patch them just like they don't path winders, what good is the security?

Except that you cannot patch Windows/2000 any more. From a related article Microsoft will no longer be providing major security upgrades to Windows/2000.

How is this taking responsibility? How is this taking accountability?

Nowhere on the Microsoft web site (that I could find) is there an announcement that Windows/2000 has reached EOL.

In my opinion, Microsoft can make no valid claims concerning accountability or responsibility, except for those concerning their bottom line.

What is the difference between Microsoft's Nick McGrath and Jeffrey Lee Parsons, the teen who got sentenced to 18 months in jail for releasing a variant of the Blaster worm? They look alike, use Microsoft operating systems for their evil deeds and they are both criminals, the only difference is that McGrath is not going to end up in jail for bogus claims and slander, at that level it's called marketing.

As others have pointed out, the Peter Williams article linked to in the article was actually written in January and it's just a vnunet.com fuckup that it's now showing with a December date.

If you want some fresh SCO info, here's the December 21 order that dismissed the remaining claim in SCO's complaint against DaimlerChrysler and thereby closed the case. Here's a write-up that includes information about some rules of Michigan's appeals court.

'same' article from 14 Jan 2004

Slashdot editors might want to remember that January comes first, so it's pretty much a year old.

Martin Riley, HP's Alphaserver business manager, admitted the migration would take some time. "HP has staked its future on its servers being architected around Itanium, whether they are HP-UX or OpenVMS. Itanium has a 20-year lifespan. Customers will not move immediately [to Itanium], and most are planning their transitions in 2006."

IBM doesn't make Thinkpad's anymore.

Article from October.

They might not have been the first to report the story, but they were the first ones to use the headline: Chestnuts roasting on an open FireWire

Design flaws in MSIE are costing billions. Given the current state of the economy, those billions are not coming out of fat, nor even meat, but bone. Currently, MSIE is the only web browser that will execute abritrary code on your machine as the result of simply looking at a web page. Similar flaws have been found every few weeks for years. Sadly, MS has been slow about fixing many and cant take weeks or months to even acknowledge a problem, just like it does for its other products. Some cannot be stopped by firewalls or AV software. You'd be a fool to broadcast your bank codes to the world by using MSIE.

Nice to know MS has made security a high priority. Hopefully its next priority will be doing something about it. Get over your blind adoration of Chairman Bill, right now there are products on the market that work they all happen to be non-MS.

How hard would it be for Apple to choose a product from one of Steve Job's old companies?

Articles I've read say that it will be released in November. But it does sound nice :) Here are some of the articles: vnunet tectonic linuxelectrons

Indeed, Bruce Perens is speaking out against releasing new stuff to OpenOffice due to Sun's "non-poliferation" agreement with Microsoft.

The newest MyDoom variant has the author asking for a job...
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1158043
The arnus worm speaks to infected users.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I just know I'm getting calls in the next few days because someone's computer says "How are you...".

Yes, they even won an award for that one.

Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows.

OK, googled it, found these: In 1998, the attempt to migrate to NT apparently failed. And in 2002, they appear to have tried again.

Anybody know if it worked?

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1157433

hitting it again on with their classical line "The SCO Group is the sole owner of the AT&T Unix System V software licensing agreement" http://www.vnunet.com/news/1157433/

after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the company expanded its focus to information security courses.

That makes no sense. I could see them expanding in the wake of some vicious worm or virus, but they might as well take their inspiration from Chechnya. It makes it seem like they are in the business to trade on fear-of-hackers rather than to provide real security. Not that that's a bad marketing angle, but just one I'd have moral issues using.

It's the iSeries, and OS/400 seems to be called i5/OS nowadays...

Reminds me of some companies effort to replace their aging AS/400 with NT systems around y2k:

Dr. Frank Soltis, the IBM engineer who has been called "the AS/400's Elvis," recently shared a success story during a keynote speech at a user conference in Florida. This particular company was in the software distribution business and at one point had 23 AS/400s located around the world. The company was a very good customer, went from CISC to RISC, and was always one of the first to upgrade to new technology, he said.

Then came the Year 2000 problem, and despite five years of dedicated service during a period of great revenue growth, the company decided that it was time to move off the AS/400. So in June of 1999, the company unplugged its AS/400s and powered up the 1,200 NT servers it needed to replace them. But things didn't quite go as planned. "They found they couldn't make it work," Soltis told the crowd. "Today, one year after unplugging their AS/400s, they're back on the AS/400."

That company is Microsoft. "They viewed that as a point of embarrassment," Soltis said. "We thought it was kind of fun....Can you think of a company with greater incentive to move to NT, and they couldn't do it?"

But it appears that Microsoft was not quite so amused, and denied the whole thing.

Then let me be the first to tell you. CAN-SPAM is likely to make spam worse. It was written by the DMA, designed to legalize their spam runs. It specifically tells companies "It's OK to spam, as long as you do it this way".

However, I'm not the first to say this, by a long shot. Using google, I can find numerous articles to that effect. Here are a few.

http://www.mailutilities.com/news/archive/163/2378 .html
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/43363
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1151902
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/09/canspam_me ans_we_can_spam/
http://www.wordsoup.com/word/archives/001243.html

There are many more examples.

I forgot to address this in my other comment, but you've been more than welcome to pay for Movable Type 2. In fact I believe commercial entities were required to pay $150. http://www.vnunet.com/Products/Software/1140884 references this, but I can't find it on MovableType.org because the site is tad sluggish. If people weren't using MT in their companies because it was free they should have read the fine print a little better.

None of them have a great deal of detail yet though, nor is there any mention of the connection between Sasser and Skynet alledged in the code of one of the varients.

Skynet was involved?!

Shit - it's only a matter of time before Terminators begin walking the earth. Makes sense that they would leverage a technology as fundamentally evil as malware though.

. . . I can't believe I just said 'leverage'. Someone kill me. Seriously.

Yeah, but it is not supported for free. It is now on a contract basis. Citing here , here and here They are rumored to be dropping support for SQL Server 2000 shortly after the release of SQL2k5.

And lets not forget liscense 6. Which will force upgrades anyway. At extra cost no doubt.

There used to be a product that did this.
I think the name of the product was Buddy B-200
Here is a few links
http://www.thinsoftinc.com/products_betwin_info.ht ml
http://www.vnunet.com/Products/Hardware/104120

I'm afraid microsoft can threaten mono development using software patents just like they do with samba. We all know that the USTPO is more or less like a patent vending machine, just pay and get your patent granted. But, like Nat said, if we should worry about patents, we won't write any code.

2000 was also the Year Of The Penguin, but that turned out to be a bad thing...

You mean like this?

EMERGENCY services, homes and businesses were hit after an underground fire in Manchester city centre cut 130,000 phone lines.

The blaze, in a tunnel by the junction of George Street and Princess Street, destroyed cables connected to the national phone network.

Related News:

No time limit for Manchester phone lines fix
Fire wipes out internet in Manchester
BT tunnel fire cuts off Manchester phone lines
BT fire disrupts emergency services
Businesses hit by BT fire
Phones Out of Action after Fire in Tunnel
Tunnel fire knocks out phone network

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Hate to break it to you, but several products couldn't be patched, because someone (hint, the letters M & S are prominent) were scrambling to get the patch out. Oh, and that patch didn't patch it, so there was another patch, which, omg, still didn't fix the stupid security hole. (if I still had the link, I'd post it)

Oh, and .NET has issues too.