Slashdot Mirror

I call on Microsoft to to take the lead in cleaning up the patent mess starting with patent 6101499. Bill Gates has established himself as a leader in philanthrophy through the Gates foundation; Microsoft is surely capable of helping lead the fight to clean up the IP system by example.

David Andersen
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

So they can spend money on a lawsuit brought to them by whoever really invented it, after all, they spend 100 mil. on patent lawsuits, even though they filed 3,000 last year, and I bet 1/3rd of them are not theirs to patent. Funny how that works.

Someone at Symantic retiring and they are trying to pump up the stock?

Recent Symantic news:
OSX Doom and gloom, Symantic will save you.

Fire Fox doom and gloom Symantic will save you.

Now this

RTFA! its "5 percent of their global turnover each day" not 5 million. "...In its last fiscal year, the twelve months up to 22 July, 2004, Microsoft achieved revenues of $36.84bn the equivalent of around $100m dollars a day."

Posted today:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39 020384,39191834,00.htm/

From ZD Net UK:

Yahoo said on Friday afternoon that a statement from the company's Australian office on Tuesday, which claimed that all future products would be compatible with both the Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) browsers, was inaccurate.

In February, Yahoo launched a search toolbar for Firefox, but users of the open source browser were forced to switch back to IE when accessing some Yahoo services. Following communications between Yahoo and ZDNet UK sister site ZDNet Australia , Yahoo issued a statement saying the company would not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring they work on both IE and Firefox.

However, on Friday, a Yahoo representative from the US admitted that the original statement was 'factually incorrect' because, although Yahoo realises that Firefox-compatibility is important, it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible.

"In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology. I'm not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas -- we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser," the representative said.

Firefox team, please wake up and listen! An official method for centralized roll-out on Windows networks is an absolute must if you want to make a dent in IE usage in the business / corporate world.

Planned for 1.1. Scroll down the article a way and you will see that one of the things planned for 1.1 is an MSI installer so it plays better with corporate deployments.

I don't see how would it stagnate anything. On the contrary, we get two competing versions, where each can make its own design choices. Neither Gnome not KDE have full control of everything. If one of them doesn't want something, the other one might accept it.

And nowhere near as bad? Here on my laptop I have exactly one look: KDE. Very infrequently I use a lone Gnome app. That's very far from the mess I often see on Windows. Please try at least some of the following: Winamp, Sonique, AdAware, ZoneAlarm, any antivirus, Trillian, MSN, Norton Utilities.

Let's take a look at these programs:
Winamp
Sonique
AdAware
ZoneAlarm
Panda Antivirus
Trillian: Norton Utilities
MS Office 2003

Let's see... Winamp and Sonique are completely non-standard, and aren't even used the same way. AdAware has its own pretty widgets. ZoneAlarm has its own non-standard looking interface. Every antivirus I've seen at least paints lots of bitmaps everywhere. And even MS Office has menus that aren't found anywhere else.

Where's the consistency? Every Windows desktop I see these days is full of stuff like the above. And every Linux desktop I see is 99% KDE or 99% Gnome, with once in a while some lone app from the other environment.

Since it seems that we have thoroughly beaten the horse to death I won't take any more swings at it but I will offer this article as a reference point (my apologies if someone else posted it). ZD Net reported on 1 March about businesses and even governments migrating away from Microsoft's products http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39 020384,39189585,00.htm. It's interesting to see how Microsoft has panicked and tried to reverse those decisions. Perhaps the U.S. Government should really rethink this one. It seems like there is a parallel in the sports world when a team signs an older free agent. Either it turns out that, half way through the season, he really is old and gets injured or he turns out to be the athlete who has trained hard and is still successful. This could prove true if Microsoft corrects some of their major problems, but we could also see Microsoft futher decline in quality and security and find that the government is taking the hit for it.

Was it removed or was considered not as important as the other announced features?

There's a really obvious possibility that you folks are missing. What if the DOJ had instead used that $13.2mil over 5 years to contract with Sun/OpenOffice.org to hire a bunch of top programmers and perfect OpenOffice. Same budget, but much better outcome for themselves and for society.

Precisely! Instead of spending gobs of money to basically tread water (by buying one static software package), a government could spend the same amount of money to contract for improvements to existing, functional, useful FOSS software (ongoing improvements), thus benefiting both themselves (better software, same budgets) and their citizenry at large (better software). Any silliness about "but that would be using MY tax dollars to support something that's free, that's communist!" etc. is simply that -- silliness -- for how is spending public funds on FOSS any worse than spending those same funds on (potentially) overpriced proprietary software? At least with FOSS, you know the code inside and out, and short of a compromised compiler, you know you've got no back doors. If I remember rightly, that's part of the Chinese government's argument against using proprietary software; this prompted MS to let them see (some of) its code.

Do you realize how tragic it is every time a deal like this goes down? Going with WP instead of MS is better than nothing, but it's a major lost opportunity to move the entire Open Source movement forward.

Thank goodness Munich has some balls. It seems some other governments are also wising up to FOSS benefits. Here's to more public initiatives to use FOSS!

Given the speed at which the industry moves, I'm guessing yes. Intel quickly created a Mac Mini clone so having extra time to figure out how to copy Apple could result in a nice chunk of sales. This is also more important for Apple since a lot of their high profile innovations (nothing high tech about a 10GB MP3 player by itself) aren't based on strange tech which makes it easy to replicate once you know what's happening. Ideas are worth big money in the design market.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof

A recipient also has to accept and download CommWarrior in order for the Trojan to launch itself.

In the url I posted above, remove the extra space added from posting between "0,39020" and "390,39190538,00" to view the article

Or Plan B, insert a proper hyperlink in your post, like this:

SuSE Linux gets desktop search

Your numbers aren't quite right. "Linux server revenues rose 35.6 percent to $1.3bn and accounted for nearly 10 percent of all server sales worldwide. Linux server shipments grew 29.1 percent, to 326,000 units, year-on-year." http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/servers/0,3902036 3,39189458,00.htm/ Now, thats pretty impressive, but considering Windows Servers also increased by 15.5% for a total of 4.6bn, it's not that impressive.

you do realise that if it CAN be proved that US corporations are behind this manipulation of the European democratic process then they are in breach of US law... also "threatening" to withdraw "investement" in a country if you don't get your way should also come under bribery as money is effectively involved... the Danes were most unimpressed and Microsoft had to hurridly kick up a misdirection statement...

If you look at the BSA web page, you will see that the members of this alliance are primarily US businesses: they list Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc etc as their members.

So in this case the original poster is correct: this law seems to have been "bought" by US businesses.

Oh no?

There have been concerted effort with Linux, however, and it has some concerted long term backing. China, Japan, and South Korea are working together on this - there have various reports like this in April 2004, or this in Spetember 2003. The notable aspect is that, as mentioned here, this isn't a short term program to adopt Linux, and results shouldn't be expected immediately - rather it is a long term plan to reposition themselves to be more independent of Microsoft.

A large part of the push is making sure Linux support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets and translations is robust and well developed - think of it as a massive scale localization project that reaches down as deep as they can get it.

How this current Debian push fits into the grand scheme of things (part of the larger project, at least in some sense, or just an independent push) is not clear to me, but regardless it represents a growing desire in Asia to move to a more flexible system that can be adapted to their specific needs. This isn't an attempt at promotion so much as a growing interest from China, Japan and Korea. Expect to see more such stories over the next 5 to 10 years.

Jedidiah.

Last I heard, the first dual cores out of the door won't share cache and will be more like two individual dies sharing the same packaging. But they'll be moving onto shared cache a la POWER at a later date.

Tried to find the Reg link I read a while back, and then found this one: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/chips/0,39020354, 39164618,00.htm

WAS. They seem to have pretty much abandoned this idea, in favour of licensing some technology from Veritas instead.

Here's one link, there's several articles out there floating around about it.

Another interesting tidbit is that HP at one point was apparently planning on acquiring Veritas, but that didn't pan out either.

Microsoft doesn't have to build a better browser. It just has to build one that's good enough.

Firefox is still doing well despite the fact that users have to take three non-passive actions: 1 ) actively seek it out and 2) download it and 3) install it. Also, large installations are reluctant to draw attention to themselves for fear of reprisal in the form of increased MS fees and such. There are, however, ways to hide from MS.

Microsoft doesn't have to build a better browser. It just has to build one that's good enough.

Firefox is still doing well despite the fact that users have to take three non-passive actions: 1 ) actively seek it out and 2) download it and 3) install it. Also, large installations are reluctant to draw attention to themselves for fear of reprisal in the form of increased MS fees and such. There are, however, ways to hide from MS.

No need to set up any fake-pirated-movie honeypots; the MPAA is already sending out enough frivolous legal threats to random websites for no apparent reason as it is.

For example: Scene.org got a copyright infringement notice a while ago claiming that a 62kb file supposedly contained an entire season of a television series. (What's funniest about this is when they sent the notice, the file wasn't even downloadable because it was still in /incoming!)
Linux Australia was the recipient of a similar notice about a couple of movies that they never had, Grind and Twisted. The files in question were Valgrind and Twisted Matrix.

distributed.net has already completed a 2^64 operation challenge a few years ago, which along with Moores law puts 2^69 ops into the realm of the possible.

What's interesting about this is that a project like this might actually have a chance of succeeding now.


See this link, section 1.2 for a little more detail on the subject.
While this doesn't help them with discovering Microsoft's private key, it could allow them to generate a modified version of a tool like GRUB who's bits hash to the same value as a Microsoft-approved binary.

Although not quite as cool as getting the actual key, this would allow running arbitray unsigned code without the need to buy a game and use a buffer overflow exploit, solder in a modchip, etc. This might also work for other game systems and similarly locked down devices.

But to be honest, this is probably the only way that MS will be able to take on OSS and have a chance to win.

So my hat is off to them on that.

Why not just focus on the core competency of marketing and lobbying and drop the pretense of making software? Oh, wait. That's being done.

Yahoo! has been known to block Trillian users too, as well as AOL.

But Klaus Holse Andersen, the European vice-president of Microsoft Business Solutions, denied on Tuesday that the jobs at Navision were ever at risk. "No, that is not what he said in the meeting," Andersen told ZDNet UK. "There is no plan for us to close down the site."

What we really need is more biometrics.

No we don't.

We all trust Microsoft.

Microsoft is mother, Microsoft is father. Protect the family, Trust Microsoft

People seem to think this is leaps and bounds above everything else, but they're missing the details. In order to obtain that much performance, you'll need a task which parallelizes well so it can be broken up into chunks for the 8 SPEs. Graphics rendering falls into this set of tasks, but a lot of general applications just don't gain that much from parallel processors. Even when you have a task that does parallelize, writing parallel code is quite a bit harder than writing code for just a single thread of execution.

I've seen a lot of hype about having the Cell in your laptop talk to the Cells in your desktop, microwave, and TiVo, but you have to consider real-world limitations. When you set up a network like that (presumably wireless), you're going to be limited to around 100Mbps. In computer clusters and supercomputers, one of the main limitations of performance is the communcation bandwidth available between processors, and the latency of the network. To build a "home supercomputer", you not only need a task that parallelizes well, but one that doesn't require so much inter-node communication that it's held back by a slow network. You can't work around this problem with hardware magic - if the task you're working on requires lots of communication bandwidth, you're going to be held back.

So how much beyond a modern PC is 250GFLOPS anyway? Not much! A GeForce FX at 500MHz does 200 gigaflops. An AMD Athlon's peak performance is 2.4 GFLOPS at 600 MHz... if we scale this up to 2.2 GHz (high-end Athlon), that's 8.8GFLOPS (note: As we're talking about theoretical performance, nonlinear factors like bus speeds can be ignored). Basically, if the Cell dedicates most of its power to graphics rendering, you'll have computation power in the same range as a fast PC of today. Given that we're not going to see any products based on the Cell for a while, this isn't going to be the end of the world for Intel and nVidia (let alone the fact that Cell isn't x86).

Consoles using the Cell will have the advantage of only having to render for TV resolutions - at most 1080 lines, while PCs will be rendering at up to 1600x1200, but if you look at recent history, you can compare the xbox to a then-good PC with a GeForce3 (which came out at around the same time) - the xbox looked better, but PCs did catch up and surpass it's performance and it didn't take all that long. Consoles have to be very high-end when they're released, because the platform doesn't change for 2-3 years, and they still need to be "good enough" after a couple years, before the next generation is released.

Remember also there's probably going to be a general election in May - now's the time to ask prospective candidates questions!

Here's some links to stuff from the SNP one, two and three

No, no missunderstanding. The CELL processor does indeed have special on chip DRM enforcment circuitry. The grandparent poster cited a Register story, and this ZDNET story confirms it as well.

The reason there is almost no information available about this is because the companies behind it know it will provoke outrage and bad press. Every as part of the DRM enforcment system CELL processor will contain a GUID - Globally Unique ID number. Much like the old Intel CPUID numbers that provoked outrage and backpeddling a few years ago. What I haven't been able to pin down as a certainty is that this DRM enforcment system is a CPU embeeded implementation of the Trusted Computing Group's specification. I'm certain it must be, but there are absolutely NO details available to pin it down.

-

You want proof? Here's one of countless others. Writing a virus is the BEST way to get hired by an AV company. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's the business model that has evolved, like it or not.

Funnily enough, although not entirely unsurprising in our current "wardrobe malfunction" times, is that you're not the first person to highlight this as 'offensive or defamatory in nature'.

Look at this article http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020 390,39186059,00.htm for some background on what's meant here. Bill somehow means that Windows interoperates best with itself, and that other OSs don't do as good a job.

C3D now Constellation 3D was talking up tech that sounded very familiar to this a few years back. Claimed that the CDs could be made for ~ the same cost as existing ones. Apparently they had a 10 layer prototype and were working on a 100 layer that was to be a 1TB disk. (for you holographic-storage-must-be-square types they even had a credit-card sized rewritable media format that they were pushing too) I can't seem to find a home page anymore and they're stock is not doing so hot.

Perhaps they were a little too far ahead of their time. (Or were just vapor to begin with)

the UK patent office is very aware of the problems that patent abuse can cause

The UKPO speaks with a forked tongue.

They have a history of saying things that mean multiple things, depending on the listener's point of view, and then campaigning strongly behind closed doors to allow unfettered patentability.

The most glaring example of this is their use of "status quo" which one might think meant that they were trying to preserve the current ban on software patents, whereas they actually want to preserve the current practice of the EPO of issuing them, by making that practice legal across the EU.

Why? Only he can say for sure, but possible reasons could be:

• distract the public from trying Linux or other Free or Open Source Software, or at least delay them.
• distract the public from real open document standards
• distract policy makers from the fact that WordML is still closed
• distract home users and businesses from OpenOffice.org
• distract everybody from FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
• distract the public from ongoing Windows security failures
• distract investors from the fact that MS has halved research and development
• distract pundits from Longhorn's list of features getting shorter and release getting later
• distract home users from the Mac mini
• distract investors from the EU anti-trust case
• distract businesses and lawmakers from the VC-1 codec
• distract European businesses from the software patent threat
• ... etc.

Apple Patent article

IBM began including a similar feature on its ThinkPad notebook line in October 2003. Apple's patent application was filed in June 2003, but it wasn't published until last week.

I doubt Apple would actually try to sue IBM for infringment, even if it does get the patent. Apple needs its G5 chips too badly.

While Microsoft will have nothing of the sort, unless they've lied through their teeth, yet the US Government still will used hundreds of thousands of instances of Windows on PC's throughout countless bureaus.

Actually, Windows 2000 SP3 has an EAL 4 Certification as well. You'll probably criticize MS for using the CAPP profile, but the article doesn't mention what profile Red Hat will be targeting.

From reviewing the doodle, it's is my expert opinion that Bill Gates has the doodling skill of my five year old son!

If you want to see the doodle in full, you can here.

I would like to know:
Is Microsoft working with hardware and computer manufacturers to make PC's "unfriendly to Linux"?

In general? It looks like it. The potential is there to ensure that rival software and operating systems will not work on this hardware:

Support for open source technologies from mainstream suppliers such as IBM and Sun has boosted the number of financial institutions using Linux from 27 percent last year to 58 percent in 2005, according to a report from financial technology researchers Finextra.

It's been a long time since MS was an IT company and for the last few years it's even been leaving the marketing sector in favor of international lobbying. I suppose this is just a watershed moment.

MSIE was its chance to get a death grip on the WWW, but MSIE won't last without the desktop monopoly. The desktop monopoly has been eroding quietly for some time, especially in Europe, China, S America and Africa. Now the sound of the erosion is not so quiet as the world discovers that Linux and other F/OSS is easy to install and use.

Yes, MS still sells MS-Windows like no other piece of software has ever sold. However, the mainstay of the desktop monopoly has been control of the OEMs, which supply over 90% of the sales of MS-Windows and about 70% of MS-Office sales. Without those two, there is no revenue to speak of. Get the OEMs and the whole dot-com bubble called Microsoft goes away overnight.

Cutting off R&D is cutting off future revenue. MS is now demonstrating how dire its situation is. It's become redundant as its defective products are replaced around the world with competing ones that actually get the job done for a change.

Google allready uses it's own filesystem (see http://www.zdnet.co.uk/insight/hardware/0,39020433 ,39175560,00.htm for more info) so the next step to a complete OS for the sole function of running it's clusters is not so far off the mark. However, would it be an OS the normal users would need or could use, i very much doubt it. It will probably be a single purpose OS with little or no configurability for other uses.

Well, 5000 patents shouldn't be too hard. They probably have tons of really really useful stuff like the infamous loo patent

This next attempt will be via the External Relations Council next Monday (31 Jan 2005).

Until sw patents politics are dead, dead, dead, in Europe, we'll have to hear about firewall patents, boolean logic patents, modula patents and anything else that fits the formula "... with a computer". This hits not just designers and developers but actually any one even using a computer.