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One little mention of broadband over the power lines (BPL)?

Interesting since Google just made a huge investment in it.

I'm sorry... but he's right. Do you think that most of the people are adopting open source software because it's better? No, they're doing it because it saves cost in the majority of cases. Look at that story submitted just a few below this one. If software came out that was very restrictive but cheaper with a lower tco and a complete win-win-out-of-the-box-market-penetrating-razzle-d azzle whatever people would jump on it. For people that build ON free software, freedom matters more, for people that build WITH free software, price matters more. In the corporate world, most people build WITH free software. This is the market that Sun's COO is addressing.

Just have a look at this article that says:

The majority of Java developers that Builder UK spoke to at the JavaOne conference on Tuesday were not concerned whether or not Sun made its implementation of Java available under an open source licence.

I will take you at your word that you are a decent guy and that your query was genuine. Can I dislike Microsoft while still liking individuals who work there or who work with their products? Sure. Just as I can criticize the actions of the government while being good friends with my neighbor Joe Civic Servant down the street. We are all familiar with how groups of decent individuals can come together in an organization that then causes them to act in ways that perpetuate the organization, even if those ways wind up being bad.

Has Microsoft changed? I don't see much of a change. Their attack on Linux hasn't gained much traction, so in recent months and years they have occasionally tried the carrot instead of the stick and said nice things about Open Source and Free Software. But since the GPL is antithetical to their business model, it seems to be just words. Their actions continue to show that they have not changed.

I spent 15 minutes with Google to come up with some recent relevant examples that show their current attitude. Is every story below accurate? Maybe not. But when there's that much smoke...

Ballmer: Linux violates patents; use it and you will be sued by somebody

MS Office XML Format licence is incompatible with the GPL

HP Memo: "Microsoft will soon be launching a patent-based legal offensive against Linux"

Microsoft using the WTO as a proxy to fight free software

Microsoft's antitrust offering 'blocks Samba'

Microsoft's New Monopoly

Microsoft remains unrepentant, says antitrust judge

Rivals Say Microsoft Flouts Antitrust Settlement

The Year of the Linux Desktop: 2003
2004: The Year of the Linux Desktop?
2004 Won't Be the Year of the Linux Desktop
2005 Will Be the Year of the Linux Desktop

Sure they just decided to do it. Not at all prompted by a rival online payment system to their subsiduary company which doesn't have the best reputation.

Example quote:
"Analysts on Monday said the biggest and most immediate risk to PayPal from a Google payment system would be a cap on growth in PayPal's off-eBay business, prompting a 2 percent drop in eBay shares."

Hmmm, let's compare a vague promise to open 'parts' of search functionality (only to registered eBay and PayPal developers) to Google's Summer of Code shall we? Let's face it, eBay still don't look like they "get it" and I doubt this attempt to get free labour will gather much momentum.

Phillip.

The Cellar

The ER1

The Barhand

or, of course, Koolio

[Please, I beg you for a mod up. I've learned my lesson about trolling, I swear.]

The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching.

Read more here:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39204643,00.htm

Opera Software Chief Executive's Raft "Not Inflated"

Is this the same exploit that was reported last month?

A ZDNet article indicates the prefetching is for Google searches only. I am not sure this would account for a 9 point spread between browsers.

Welcome to yesterday morning's news, Slashdot.

While I don't expect cutting edge anymore (and haven't for some time), I at least expect something within 48 hours before the news is old and tired. Things move fast on t3h int4rw3b.

Well, considering that on Tuesday, they were granted a patent on marshaling XML to and from objects, I'd guess they still have their bases covered. Yeah, the XML is "open", but you can't write an application to convert that XML into an object map without violating their new "intellectual property".

Would'nt this approach cause MS to loose its lock-in ability based on file format?

The interesting thing is that all this server based control and logging of DMR'd functions gives an enormous boost to the type of information available for international and corporate espionage. Through backdoors, security holes or escrow keys it was possible before to get only the documents themselves for the most part. Now it's possible to monitor who's collaborating with who, and see everyone in the distribution chain.

That much can be guessed even now during the vaporware stages. However, as more technical information becomes available it will be possible to guess whether these same functions can be used for more than monitoring and can actually be used to stifle or suppress dissent or specific individuals or groups.

Between DRM and third party admin access it's not your system. Yeah, you bought the hardware and exhibit some level of control over the documents, but yours is not the last word on anything that happens on that machine while it's running MS-Windows.

It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.

All the reports say the spam problem is worse "over there", with "over there" being decided by the report writer. Rather than falling for the distraction let's look at the common denominator: MS still needs constant tinkering, it's not for amateurs or home users. Use OS X, BSD or Linux instead.

MS is like the old style Harleys. You know the ones from decades ago, before the retooling, where you had to have your toolkit with for any serious road trips. Neither is practical for your casual user.

Even recent versions like XP, still aren't ready for the desktop. Though some claim that XP about even with KDE. For home users that surf, check e-mail, listen to music, watch DVDs and maybe edit a few digital images, there's no need to waste time and money on a system which required esoteric knowledge and constant tinkering. A machine with a pre-installed and pre-configured Linux distro or OS X will save home users AND their ISPs weeks of headache per year. And, unless your time is free, this means substantially less burden.

For businesses you get economy of scale. Plus, zombies are not your only threat. If MS can read your business files and mail so can your competitors.

• you run everything as an admin. If you try not to, things break. So you leave it as is until the day you'll visit a mallicious webpage and/or run a mallicious app. Or what about your privacy? ANY user on a windows system can read/modify any of your private files because they are all admins!
• the messenger service (not MSN messenger) is running and you are subject to spamming delivered directly on your desktop!
• UPnP is on by default and wide open to the rest of the world. I haven't met any windows user who needs UPnP and yet it's on by default.
• DCOM is again on by default and wide open to the rest of the world. Again, I haven't met any windows user who needs UPnP and yet it's on by default.
• there are countless other needless services that although they are useless, if you try to shut them down, things will break! So you end up leaving them running with your machine potentially owned at any moment!
• there are countless windows specific accounts and groups in your machine that pose a security risk, but if you try to remove any, your system will break!
• Internet Explorer is integrated into Windows. So any flaw in IE results in a OS compromise. That smells like bad design doesn't it? Oh wait...they did it to counter the anti-trust lawsuit. That says something about MS priorities. Profits come first, user security - who cares?
• ActiveX. Need I say more?

These are all over the place. Some require special paper; others apparently don't. See e.g.

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/inputdevices/0 ,39023905,39119056,00.htm

http://www.pc-notetaker.com/?an=google-new

http://www.zyonshop.com/product/ipen.htm

I wonder what the EU would do if Microsoft decided to fight back? What's preventing them from taking a page from IBM's playbook and firing people, mostly in Europe, to make up for the $5 million a day? I'm not sure how many employees Microsoft has in Europe, but it would likely put a serious dent in that $5 million.

Well, I'm not a lawyer, but those sound like pretty specifically defined activities, why not just pass laws against them?

You could try, but the companies would argue that they were genuine patents, until proven otherwise in a court of law. Since the possible profits if they win can go into billions of dollars, there is a good incentive for doing so.

A good example is the Rambus vs. Infineon, Hynix and Micron patent dispute which dragged on for five years, and was eventually settled at least with one company.

``As of now.'' Something about your proposal is worrying me, but as of now I can't put my finger on it.

Yes, it's a good, sensible plan for today, but there's this terrible little flaw which keeps it from being a long term solution.

...the other big Google news of the week on Slashdot where they announce that they are pulling their web accelerator.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39197931,00.htm

This is the Motorola MPX: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/handhelds/0,39 023880,39164765,00.htm

This is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Becta will be publishing their report next Friday.
Those of us who have seen it, will vouch for the fact that the TES article conveys the essential facts, but the full report will signal the start of some wholesale moves to F/L/OSS in the UK Educational sector.

The story was leaked in the first place, despite the purdah due to the UK General Election, by eGov Monitor (http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/695) and rapidly followed up by ZDNet (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,3902 0390,39196487,00.htm)

ZDNet's article hints at the fact that BECTA will be working with 'Open Source' representatives in the UK to promote the uptake of F/L/OSS in the UK Education market. eGov Monitor get a little closer to the truth here (http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/818)

All will be revealed next week.

This is the next in a whole series of events that is bringing F/L/OSS to the UK Public Sector. More on the way...

You could not be more wrong. AMD's share of the CPU market was only 16.1 % in Q4 2004 based on unit sales and only 9% based on revenue which makes it obvious that AMD is selling more of the low-priced Semprons than they are the higher-priced Athlons. Based on those numbers, Intel is outselling AMD 88% to 9% or 9.78 to 1. As far as company-wide profits, Intel reported net income of $2.2 billion for Q1 2005 on revenues of $9.4 billion while AMD reported a loss of $17.4 million on revenues of $1.23 billion. Those are the facts and they also mesh with what you see when you go to an online computer sales website for Dell, IBM, HP, Sony, or Gateway where there's mostly Intel-inside models or when you go down to your local computer store where most of the desktops and laptops will be Intel-inside. It would be more interesting to talk about *why* no one buys the obviously-better AMD products than it is to pretend that it isn't so.

February 07 ZDNET story on the Cell processor. Not much info, but does mention that the Cell will have ON-CHIP DRM enforcement.

#&*$!@ Trusted Computing crap.

-

cough cough cough .

Welcome to the 21st century.

IIRC, when the G5 was released, The Steve said that 3GHZ chips would be available within 12 months. It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz. Close, but I don't get why the Mac Faithful are defending this modest speed jump, when we should have been there last year.

Not as current as I hoped to find, but as of April, 2003, AOL had 26.2 million subscribers. Reference

Note that this is down from 32 million in 2001, but I'm still guessing they have a fair chunk of warm bodies. Reference

Ahh, here we go. 22.7 million Sept. 2004. Wish I had that many clients :) Reference

The reviewer is clueless and the article is far from comprehensive. The reviewer doesn't know Solaris 9, which is pretty much required to properly understand Solaris10. Solaris is a Server OS meant to run on server grade HW. It only needs compatibility with server grade hw from tier 1 suppliers. Don't expect to see Solaris on your laptop anytime soon and don't expect support for the latest video cards. Most servers these days are headless, or pretend to be. For one, Solaris isn't installed so much as it's cloned. You create your install image during development, then clone the "gold" drive thousands of times as you ship servers. The author states "compatibility only guaranteed for code written for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3". Such comments only show the authors lack of understanding of Linux. The comments are more interesting and informative than the article itself. http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/os/0,39024183, 39195793,00.htm

What's more, HURD isn't finished and there's no problem with the concept of forking Linux anyway. If RMS wants a kernel now, that works, and for some reason dislikes something about the way Linux is developed, all he has to do is copy the entire thing to Savannah.org and appoint someone to maintain it. It is, after all, licensed under the GPL.

Torvalds has done some dumbass things of late, and criticising Andrew for wanting to create a Free Software client that interoperates with the SCM Torvalds has adopted is one of them. It's also downright unethical, given he knows McVoy is threating lawsuits, and Andrew is limited to the extent to which he can respond to Torvalds, and given the extent to which Torvalds is himself lying about what's happened.

Conspiracy? Nope. Just smart people doing dumb and nasty things.

Oh, and "Ovum's Barnett": If we agreed with you, we wouldn't have GNU based operating systems such as RedHat and Debian. Linus's little kernel would be an asterisk. Without people wanting certain basic freedoms when they receive software, we'd be using Windows and Unix. Why wouldn't we? I find it remarkable people actually pay you money to come up with this drivel.

See http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/developer/0,39 020469,2137707,00.htm

The article calls it "Dogfooding". As for the "certified" people the paper MCSEs screw up more than they help anyway. When they screw up it's easy to tell their boss "Well, Microsoft's software make me do it!" Nice scapegoat. And, I'm willing to bet money most of the problems are caused by ignorant sysadmins. So, by taking the small percentage of "certified" personal in the field and trying to portray them as the majority does not validate your argument in anyway.

So, I've proved it and seem like someone else needs to "shut up"

Intel dual core systems are shipping. You can buy them at Dell.News Story.

Banner networks distribute child pornography banners without liability. Download one of those banners though and you are a felony child pornographer in the United States. I'd prefer to stay clear of felony child porn charges, so I'm sticking with my ad blockers. Thanks.

By the time Longhorn ships, according to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, PCs will have 4GHz to 6GHz processors, more than 2GB of memory, at least a terabyte of storage, and graphics accelerators three times more powerful than those offered by ATI and Nvidia today. He says that Longhorn is designed to take advantage of all this muscle, and nowhere is that more evident than in the rich, three-dimensional interface known as Aero.

Points to ponder:

1. People don't even want to move to SP2, do you think people will buy all this muscle for Longhorn?

2. What exactly is a 3D interface? Would we need to wear 3D goggles to use it?

3. Longhorn is built around three major advances--a new graphics and presentation engine known as Avalon, a new communications architecture known as Indigo, and a new file system known as WinFS that borrows from Microsoft's relational database technology. Avalon and Indigo are catchy names, but are we going to have loads of compatibility issues?

4. How much MORE is Longhorn going to cost? Is it going to be subscription based?

5. How many software patents are MS going to secure for this?

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Debian.
Especially in germany are a lot of organizations which were dissatisfied with SUSE services and switched to Debian.
According to Noèl Köthe's employer credativ, a company with strong Debian background, has made a SUSE to Debian migration for 30-40 organizations in 2004.

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

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

Unfortunatly The Resolution of Invesigatory Powers Act 2000 was actually passed. I hate this country sometimes. As far as I know the "log everything" part has never been implemented. For "technical reasons", i.e. it's fucking ridiculous. I can't find any mention of it more recent than this article

Also worth cruifying your years over http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020481,212 2414,00.htm IT Anthems

Then again, the code can also be distributed at v2 by someone else and still maintained at that version. Besides I can't imagine developers not liking v3.

Posted a month or so ago on /., GPL 3 is likely to include changes to take into account international copyright law and a new strategy to cope with the threat of patents, according to Moglen.

I never use cmd. I use bash (or zsh) on cygwin. It is remarkably powerful and does everything I need.

I can't even imagine working on cmd without the things I take for granted on bash. piping, redirection (yeah, they exist on cmd, but not as powerful as on bash/zsh/ksh/whathaveyou), symlinks, advanced scripting and so on and so forth. Further more you have such a rich toolset with cygwin. You can do a whole bunch of stuff with grep, sed, and awk and a cool one-liner. Try doing that on cmd. I'm sure MS has it in them to create a really good shell language. But I guess they won't implement something new because like in the case of IE, they don't think that their customers need new features because they haven't "told them about it".

I never use cmd. I use bash (or zsh) on cygwin. It is remarkably powerful and does everything I need.

I can't even imagine working on cmd without the things I take for granted on bash. piping, redirection (yeah, they exist on cmd, but not as powerful as on bash/zsh/ksh/whathaveyou), symlinks, advanced scripting and so on and so forth. Further more you have such a rich toolset with cygwin. You can do a whole bunch of stuff with grep, sed, and awk and a cool one-liner. Try doing that on cmd. I'm sure MS has it in them to create a really good shell language. But I guess they won't implement something new because like in the case of IE, they don't think that their customers need new features because they haven't "told them about it".

Bunch of bloody commies

Using reverse-engineering methods to find out about proprietary software is not illegal, rules a Californian court.

If Clippy is popular then why did Microsoft decide to hide it by default?

With regard to the registry: it violates two principles of good software architecture. First, you want to minimize the multiplication of namespaces and data access methods. Second, you don't want corruption of a single file to result in an inability to access your whole system.

You could argue that relational databases tend to violate these principles as well but the truth is that when they are used in volume applications they _are_ the data store and the metadata store and the single, unified namespace as well. They also have many more corruption-fighting features than does the registry.

Amusingly, Morgan Stanley has already predicted that Apple share will rise to 5% of the market this year. It was even posted on Slashdot.

So, how's that foot taste?

You're missing their strategy. That iPod ad *IS* a mac ad... or more correctly: the resulting iPod sales are.

Until very recently most people wouldn't even consider a Mac. BUT those same people WILL buy iPods. Apple is betting that satisfied iPod customers will become more willing to buy Macintosh computers. This is the so-called "halo effect".

And it's working! Morgan Stanley estimates that 20%(!) of Windows using iPod buyers also end up buying a Mac at some point in the future. iPod ads are a "two-fer" for Apple. They sell iPods, and for every 5 iPods they eventually sell a Mac too. Supposedly they are on track to nearly double their market-share in this manner.

The greater willingness of the general consumer to consider an iPod and thier subsequent increase in willingness to buy a Mac may even mean that airing an iPod commercial is more effective at selling Mac computers than running a Macintosh ad would be.

Maybe Microsoft could offer some kind of discount?

I mean that's never happened before...

I mean, come on. Is there really a patent which describes an excentric weight on an axle of a motor? It almost sounds as stupid as the amazon's shopping cart licence thing: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/print/?TYPE=story&AT=391474 08-39020372t-10000024c

Isn't it time that the patent rules are updated so that patents only can contain "sensible" and "specific" text, including maybe the marketing intent of the device/product/idea? With millions and millions of patents, it's hard to do business without infringing any one of them.

Besides, why is Immersion comming with this just as they "happen" to need money? The first foce feedback controller by Sony was sold before 2000, why didn't Immersion do it then? I'd say they're too late.

If you can't do business properly, don't sue others for the fact that they can.

Linux Being Offered To Secure Online Banking

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 25, @10:28AM
from the can't-be-too-careful dept.

TheWanderingHermit writes "Australian company Cybersource says it's currently talking to two banks in Australia about providing Linux-based bootable CDs to consumers to ensure Internet banking security. They are considering using a modified Knoppix for online banking users as a way to make it more secure. They are in 'reasonably serious' discussions with some banks over this idea." From the article: "We don't expect too much action at this point from the major banks...We'd probably expect some of the more regional ones or some of the providers of other financial services to be the first onboard with something like this."