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FUD, pure FUD + 10% troll.

Now, read this, this, and this and weep!

>USB2 on the other hand is expected to be in Windows XP SP1

Oh yeah, that'll catch on just like USB 1.0 caught on when Windows 95 OSR2 came out (ffft... yeah, right...).

>Since 99% of all computer users use Windows, USB2 will catch on incredibly fast leaving FireWire in the dust.

Since 99% (as you say) of users already have firewire support why the f*ck would they switch all their stuff to USB 2.0?

>Sometimes you Slashdot folk have to remember that just because you think the technology is better, doesn't mean it will catch on. Hmm, how long has the Gameboy had a black and white screen until they used color?

All the real geeks knew the B/W systems were better because at the time you'd be lucky to play all of Sonic the Hedgehog without replacing the batteries. I could beat Super Mario World 3 times over and the battery light was still bright red.

>So, has Apple made an attempt to turn people away from USB?

And why should they? USB is fine for slow devices like keyboards and mice that need to be cheap, and don't generate a lot of data, and aren't likely to be hooked up without a computer being in the mix.

>not even with OS X which you can tell is aimed at Windows XP with it's XPish interface

Ahahah! I don't even own a Mac and I've never seen OS-X except for glimpses of it on "The Screen Savers" and I can tell you it doesn't look at all like XP.

It's very handy because most profs don't suspect a thing when you look at your watch during a test.

Nintendo responded by dropping the GameCube's launch price to $AU329.

Hurrah, etc.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate, with no writeoffs on this amount. These additional taxes should be a small price for industry to pay for the increased profits that would result from all that sudden demand now that their material isn't available for copying in digital form, now that general purpose computers would be outlawed.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? That's OK--we can just sell the assets of the companies benefiting from the SSSCA to take care of the taxes, then.

Since this will now result in the total demise of copyright infringement, the movie, recording, and video game industries then immediately pay taxes on the hojillions of dollars they claim to be losing per year, at the prevailing highest corporate tax rate.

Oh--you mean they aren't going to sell all that, because the people they claimed as having been costing them money wouldn't have bought the product anyway? Guess we can just sell the industries to pay the taxes, then.

I realize both the weather balloons and Helios are just means to an end, but using these things for broadband internet would be way cooler than the US's second-rate cell technology, which is what they want to use the weather balloons for.

Just because you are unconvinced or never heard of something does not make ME a moron.

You can't sue a company in China. The only thing you can do is to crack down on the smuggling.

Here's a breakdown of what the US Customs seized in the first half of 2001. Note this is only what it seized; who knows how much actually gets through. US Customs Seizures. In the 2000 figures you see Consumer Electronics at 3%. Not much, but yes, it does exist.

As for what Philips is doing; in India, they conducted 27 raids in 19 months on factories making counterfeit products story.

From the Aussie ZDNet, a story about a huge shipment of counterfeit Nokia phones. story.

Doing a google search about China and counterfeiting and you find mostly software and playstation game piracy stories. But you can find stories about counterfeit consumer electronics if you look.

That's old news, actually. Today it was Telstra rigging a ZDNet Australia poll.

Talking about anniversaries, probably many of you have noticed that today is the *web* 10th.
(it's in
in zdnet and many other places).

I thought this could be a good announcement for a web-based news site ;-)

Cheers for all those pioneers that started all this.

J.

This articleshows how SMS can be useful in emergencies, places with bad coverage,etc.

This offers a welcome relief after the defamation ruling in Victoria, Australia (http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebusiness/story/ 0,2000024981,20261845,00.htm) that says anyone anywhere in the world can download material and sue you in their local jurisdiction.
The California case doesn't deal with jurisdiction, but it offers some blanket protectio

Anon is right in saying that there have been other logging tools for Linux, linuxbsm in particular has come a long way. Unfortunately though, some of these tools are either focussed on different logging capabilities (eg: swatch is a log file watcher, it alerts users when a particular line occurs in arbitrary log files, and can actually be used in conjunction with SNARE), or seem to be stalled in development.

SNARE is more like the Windows NT event logger, or the Solaris BSM subsystem - but we hope that the experience we've had with these systems (and others: AIX, netware, Unicos, ACF2/RACF, etc.) will lead to an even better implementation for Linux.

The team at InterSect made sure that we held off releasing SNARE until we were confident that it could stand on it's own feet against the auditing subsystems from other operating systems.

The positive feedback that we're getting (thanks Sinner!) is certainly proving that people are interested, and we made the right decision.

>Telstra declined to divulge how many Freedom >Plan subscribers it has but said it anticipated >some would opt to change carriers on the back of >the announcement.

> >Users who chose to cancel their existing service >with Telstra will not incur termination fees, >according to the telco.

IMHO optus is currently WAY better. you can download about 600mb a day before you get kicked (so 4-500mb safe) over a 14day average. yes I am an optus user because telstra were being assholes to us when we wanted their cable...aswell they have a better police:
a)you CAN use a gateway
b)you can download more than your email without getting kicked
c)optus modem is an ISO standard where telstra uses its own standard so optuses modem can be used inother countries with other companies but telstra's modem cannot.

telstra is big on the really good management decisions...no wonder everyone is getting pissed at telstra.

http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0 ,3811,2085164%5E442,00.html

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/2001/06/06/ FFXHH7FZLNC.html

http://it.mycareer.com.au/breaking/2001/06/06/FFX7 G6FZLNC.html

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/telco/story/0,2000020 799,20227632,00.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/nat/newsnat-6j un2001-50.htm

http://www.whirlpool.net.au

http://www.a1h.com

One interesting point is that the problems caused by the cut cable were nothing compared to the problems Telstra had on the night due to other factors. As this outage notice states, they had routing loops form within their network when the cable went down.

Also, an electricity substation supplying power to the main Telstra internet POP in Sydney exploded around the same time, cutting power to all of their routers. Power wasn't restored until the following morning.

More here, here and here (check the graphs).

Shawn made Business Week's E-Biz 25, and he had some Q&A with ZDNET.au not too long ago. It's fun to watch his public discourse over only a couple months when he himself is only a handful of dozens of months old himself.

This article in zdnet Australia has some of the details, and describes the fact the the displays are made with a "specialty printer that can shoot red, blue and green polymer inks ... from three separate cartridges, then mix with a fourth cartridge that contains a conductive polymer. The printer "prints" small drops of the four inks onto a thin screen, which combined with electrodes will make an LEP display.", says that these displays will have about 200dpi and states that "Best of all, Seiko-Epson is working on a mammoth printer that will create screens 15 feet across with no seams and without the staggering yield problems that plague LCD technology."

At the moment these displays are created sandwiched in glass, but to be released commercially, they need to be able to be set in plastic. Still mighty impressive. The CDT website has a lot of technical papers on how these LEP's work, and interesting read.

And I quote:

"Basically any 3D rendering was quite likely to have been done on the FreeBSD machines (we can't say exactly what because CPUs are allocated automatically from a pool via a queuing system). This includes things like the big completely CG view of the foetus fields or the shots of the Nebuchadnezzar and its environment."

(in classic reference to The Matrix, of course.)

Also notable: the single BIGGEST movie in Hollywood, ever, as much as we hate to admit it...

When "Titanic" opened on Dec. 19, 1997, Linux developers rejoiced. Not because the movie proved how bad an actor Leonardo Di Caprio was but because the Titanic owed its existence to the Linux operating system -- specifically, the 105 Linux servers that crunched numbers in the backroom of the offices of special-effects company Digital Domain.

In reference to Titanic, which, IIRC, was the single most-money-grossing movie in Hollywood's history ever. Thanks in no small part to Open Source.

Last week ZDNet Australia ran a story noting complaints from the sight impaired community that the official site for the Games www.olympics.com failed to provide a significant amount of information formatted in ways that can be read by text only (and therefor text-to-speech enabled) browsers. Examples of non-text friendly data include "the sport index, which provides event schedule information for 36 Olympic sports" and the results of competitions, "Something which [a representative for the site] claims will cost AU$4 million and take 368 days to do," according to one of the complainants.

This also means that the site is not meeting guidelines laid out by the WWW Consortium.

The combination of not providing a site meeting the needs of all users, and then censoring what others can report from the Games, means a total blackout of Internet information for these users.

Since Britain passed its Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill, security experts have examined the technology behind the e-mail snooping that is allowed in the law. Allegedly, the technology is extremely easy for savvy computer users to avoid (i.e. the sort of people that the government hopes to catch in illegal acts). If the cybercriminals can bypass the tap with ease, then whose e-mail gets scanned? Answer: ordinary people. That's why a number of experts are explaining to citizens what steps are necessary to remain invisible to the RIP's black boxes.

Attrition mirror of the site.

Also, an article on this incident from Australia ZDNet.

The Australian Version of this Article Had the Almighty quote

As "Scumdamn" wrote, "Is it just me or did the world just gain color? I feel like dancing around singing 'Ding Dong the witch is dead!'"

Did this appear in the US version??

After I checked out the the original Posting Here it looks like they even quoted the wrong author.

http://www.info world.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/petrel/980713np.h tm
"The National Security Agency (NSA) lists the following configurations as having been evaluated for U.S. C2 certification: Windows NT 3.5 with Service Pack 3 on the Compaq ProLiant 2000 and ProLiant 4000 Pentium systems, and on a DECpc AXP/150. The LSEL diagnostics software was used as part of the configuration. The systems were certified only in a stand-alone configuration (no network). No other version of Windows NT has received C2 certification on any hardware platform (Windows NT 3.51 was C2-certified in October 1996, but only in the United Kingdom)."
http://www.zdnet.com.au /zdnn/content/zdnn/0923/2140612.html
"To date, Microsoft has not obtained C2 certification for any release of NT beyond version 3.5, the company acknowledges."

The future may "end with Z" but it still doesn't compete in design with Apples' past. This beautiful gem was underpowered but the design is perfect.
Hey, Apple! Can I have one of these with an AltiVec enhanced G4 processor, Firewire and a 14+" flatpanel? I'd pay good money!