Slashdot Mirror

You think you're joking...

The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

For anyone interested in reading some other news and viewpoints on the announcement, check out articles in VNU net, PC World and Cnet.

Current active matrix displays use amorphous silicon thin film transistors as pixel drivers. This means that the backlight has to pass through both the silicon film and the liquid crystal itself. The combined attenuation is quite high and a very bright backlight is required.

If this polymer semiconductor is more transparent than amorphous silicon this could result in significant power savings on the backlight to achieve the same brightness.

You might remember this article and the slashdot discussion about it claiming that the Transmeta processor improve battry life help that much because the display is the real power hog. Any improvement in display power consumption will be very much welcomed.

----

There was one such rumour on Wired's site:

MS loves Linux? More evidence that Linux is gaining ground as a desktop operating system comes from Microsoft, which is reportedly planning a Linux version of its Windows Media Player software.

According to a story on VNUNet.com, Microsoft is considering releasing a Linux version of its Media Player after launching a Macintosh version.

"We see a need for Unix players and are working in that direction, including Linux," Paul Boudreau, Microsoft's program manager for music and entertainment, said in the article.

They have found that its more profitable to take away peoples choices, than to produce good products.

IHMO, where capitalism fails (in the good society/market sense) is when you start getting to intellectual property. With a product that can be reproduced indefintitely, it becomes more important fiscally to restrict access than make a good product. Removing any type of competition is also important, since that might drive down the percieved value of your product. Then you just have to squeeze, baby!
--

Oh, give me a break. In the absence of a real, credible source that counters the statement, the only thing you can do is take them at their word.

I guess you should just believe the opposite of everything they say right? They say (at the time) it ran on Solaris and FreeBSD. Guess that must be a lie as well, right? I guess we shouldn't believe them that they're currently migrating to Windows 2000.

Selectivly choosing what you want to believe, based only on whether it supports your side is what zealotry is all about.

There are no facts to support a migration to NT in 1998. On top of that, the same magazine that posted the original article posted this article a few weeks later, which talks about how MS has done major and massive overhauls on Hotmail (supposedly, while also doing this massive migration which failed). How exactly does MS get all those overhauls done at the same time they're migrating? There simply isn't enough manpower to do all that.

WAP is a Wireless protocol, as is, for example, GSM. You could say that GSM is a bad protocol as it carries a lot of cellular baggage, but that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. And, as somebody already pointed out, WAP is a transition-period protocol, not a final solution to wireless presentation and transfer of Web content.

As to the slow uptake, during the April to June period BT Cellnet sold 175,000 new WAP phones in the UK (out of a total 670,000). Full story here.

obDisclaimer: I don't represent internet.com or LinuxToday. Anyone who says I tried is full of it.

I post to LinuxToday on a daily basis (my user name is "mhall"), and I write for LinuxPlanet (you can also l ook at my article history. My status in both relationships is that of a freelancer ("independent contractor").

There is a policy against announcing new site launches. I don't know when it was enacted because I'm fairly new to LinuxToday. I can say, however, that we routinely reject new site announcements. If one gets posted, it was a mistake.

There's another side of the coin, though, and one which the person posting the initial question could have followed: part of the LinuxToday "family" is the site LinuxPR, which allows anyone with a Linux-related business or site to join at no cost.

By signing up for LinuxPR, anyone posting a Linux-related press release (new product announcement, conference, or, most important to this case, site launch) gets their press release posted not only on the main page of LinuxPR, but on the front page of LinuxToday. Press releases are posted on a frequent basis as we're able. My own personal habit is to look in on the press releases several times an hour while I'm posting stories. I even take the step of correcting bad URL's and cleaning up some of the more egregious grammar problems.

Second, sites doing more than just announcing their existence are always welcome to use the LinuxToday contribute form.

Spend a few minutes looking at LinuxToday, please. Where do the stories come from? They come from other sites. How much of each story do we carry before pointing the reader to the rest of it? Seldom more than three or four paragraphs. When we have a reciprocal agreement with an organization like VNUNet or when the story is run by another internet.com site that isn't in the Linux channel we'll run the whole thing (which, when you think about it, is actually limiting the number of banners the internet.com site is going to move.) If anything, LinuxToday provides a means by which some smaller Linux-related sites can get more traffic than they might have before we thoughtfully provided a link to their story along with a few paragraphs of "teaser" to get the reader's curiosity up.

If LinuxToday were following an "anti-other-Linux-sites" policy, it would soon dry up and blow away. The strength of the site is the near-constant flow of news from around (and outside) the Linux community.

Finally, (and because this is the part most people will feel the most comfortable ignoring, because I'm talking about my client):

Despite several months of working on LinuxToday, I have never felt particularly "watched over" by internet.com. The other editors on the site and its primary programmer are all Linux enthusiasts who are interested in providing a good service to the Linux community. I've never knowingly withheld a story for any reason other than the fact we've already covered it ad nauseum or that it should be submitted as a press release because it's nothing more than an attempt to sell something (including eyeballs).

When I first threw in my lot with LinuxToday and LinuxPlanet, I had some concerns about the nature of the entity that owned them. My own roots in Linux go back over four years, and I've been a UNIX enthusiast for more than twice that time. I've contributed documentation to a major open free software product under the copyleft. I love Linux, and I love the community surrounding it. I get up each day at 6 a.m. to start posting on LinuxToday, and my thoughts are not to how well the money's flowing that day, but how much information is being moved to readers. When I set fingers to keyboard for a story on LinuxPlanet, it isn't because I'm thrilled at the prospect of creating revenue, it's because I hope I can help people make decisions, or inform them in some way. The people I work with (who are in a more durable relationship with internet.com than I) have shown the same instincts and concern for the Linux community.

There may be a site worthy of paranoia and suspicion, but I don't think LinuxToday is it.

Though it should not require reiteration, I'll note once more that I don't speak for any of the entities mentioned in this post besides myself. I'm just a freelancer.

Kind regards,

Michael
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia

There are a number of problems with the Data Protection Act.

Firstly, to sign up with the ISP, you have given them name, address, date of birth and probably your phone number, as condition of using them.

Since most of them require your e-mail address and password when you sign on, they effectively have, via their logs, who you are, demographics (unless you lied), phone number (because you are phoning them) and everywhere you went. All of this is quite legitimate within the terms of the Data Protection Act. Indeed, under the Regulation of Investigtory Powers Act, it will probably become mandatory.

The trick is to check the Data Protection registration of the ISP. If they are not registered to use this data for marketing purposes, you have them by the short and curlies. You can search for this on the Data Protection Registrar web site . For instance, here is the registration made by the UKs favourite ISP, Freeserve. Note the first purpose is marketing to individuals. I also saw an article in Computing magazine where Freeserve stated that they intend to do exactly that.

Note on the Freeserve new user registration page, you have the normal 'opt out' boxes (jury is out on their legality in the UK AFAIK). It mentions 'Terms and Conditions' too, but this link doesn't work (ha ha ha ROFL). When it works, I bet it mentions that the data they collect will be processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act.

In short, I don't believe that the Data Protection Act will offer much of a defence to ISPs using their logs to market at you, as you will have to give them this right under the Data Protection Act when you sign up with them in the first place.

Many of these stories have been submitted to $slashdot recently, yet they don't seem to get posted - why? Because Andover is getting desperate as is the whole Linux community.

The nightmare for Linux is comming true, Win2K is a serious, stable OS that is a strong contender as a server and light years ahead of Linux for the desktop.

Microsoft is great at comming through in a clinch, remember the internet?

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.

Microsoft's latest OS is selling well

INTERVIEW-China approves Microsoft Windows 2000

Users lap up Windows 2000 despite warnings

New operating system is a hit

Windows 2000 Sales Brisk; and Musings on "Pure Java"

Apparently they are. Check this article, Sun releases NFS as open source , or this one, Sun loosens its grip on NFS . Alas, it looks like it's going to be released under YAWSL (Yet Another Wacky Sun License), but it's apparently only for the Transport Independent Remote Procedure Call (TI-RPC) protocol.

JimD

It isn't really all that surprising. Most companies with serious Server hardware would have at one point or another have installed a Linux system, even if just to see what the operating system was like. This is increasingly likely as the Linux distributions are so freely available, they are even sometimes distributed on CDs attached to magazines. Linux has received an enormous amount of attention in the "free" Press that tends to go round corporate IT areas. I seem to remember that there hasn't been an edition of Network News that hasn't had an article regarding Linux for months.

This is a pure ballpark estimate, but I would say if you took all companies with Support and Network departments of more than 5 people, that 90% of those companies have at one point or another had a Linux box operating on their network.

I've used MySQL on Linux quite a bit at my previous work place, and I have to say that would feel more confident with it. Oracle offers many features that MySQL doesn't (rollback, sub-selects, sequences, triggers, etc) but the support issue is questionable. I have little evidence, but I would say the main reason we haven't had troubles with Oracle support is that it worked out of the box (RedHat 5.2, following the install directions that came with Oracle). Certainly the interface of MySQL is more userfriendly, but this is coming from someone who learned SQL on the fly.

Based off of my experiences, Oracle on Linux can deliver very well, but it isn't immune to the problems that will plague any and all closed-source projects. Even if the company is "serious" today, they may not be so tomorrow. [This on the heels of Oracle's announcement that NT may no longer be a primary platform] If something goes wrong, you are at the mercy of that company.

"We have not closed the door finally on [Irix, SGI's version of Unix, on Intel], but the current feeling from an applications standpoint is that Linux is the right answer. Given the resources we have, we have to focus on just one [operating system] and that one is Linux.

(In this context, "on Intel" presumably means "on IA-64", not "on x86".)

Here, rather.

For some reason the comment poster/editor doesn't like quotes in links.. And, it posted my first update as an AC..

Is something broken?

-Jeff

The link is: here rather.

I had the right link for the original post, but for some reason the comment poster/editor doesn't like quotes in an HREF.

-Jeff

Some people make arguments that the only reason for this is because Windows is more common/popular. Yeah... 80000x more common? I think not. Besides, there would be a certain presige in writing a Unix virus as they are so rare.

This story is dated 1st June! I also wrote a piece about this at the time which showed up NT more than NetWare - it seems that NetWare is re-gaining market share, and stopping the NT tide, whereas Linux is mopping up the rest.

Considering that a previous posting dealt with Slashdot as the new form of journalism: come on guys! News has to be new! Sort out your editorial policy!
--

Barry de la Rosa,
Senior Reporter, PC Week (UK)
Work: barry_delarosa[at]vnu.co.uk,
tel. +44 (0)171 316 9364

Infospinner has done the research for you. On the main page of their website they reference this article from pcweek that talks about 20 other companies doing clustering solutions before infospinner is even mentioned. I can't believe they are this stupid. I wish there were criminal penalties for abusing the patent system like this (and I wish patent officials could be held responsible for their incompetency - even notary publics are held to be responsible)

I too found his comments on Java, detailed in VNU.net to be off base. Call Java what you want, the fact is that it is very hot and a large part of the developer community is behind the momentum.