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It would be very funny if Adobe, just for spite, decided to stop making it's high end graphic design products compatible with Apple hardware. And figured out a way to make them not work via virtualization on Apple hardware as well.

Adobe has had delusions of being a serious platform vendor ever since they merged with Macromedia and got ahold of Flash, but Creative Suite is still most of Adobe's revenue, and a majority of Creative Suite sales are still Mac based. I've seen numbers as high as 75% (see end of article).

So, yeah, abandoning Mac support, for Adobe, would be about like abandoning Windows support for vendors in most other markets.

Follow The Money Mike Anderer March 2004
An e-mail from consultant Mike Anderer to SCO's Chris Sontag revealing Microsoft's channeling of US$ 86 million to SCO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Halloween_documents_leak

On Monday, court documents from the ongoing court case between IBM and SCO claimed Microsoft had encouraged financial firm BayStar to invest in SCO. The claim was made by BayStar founder Larry Goldfarb, who said Microsoft's vice president of corporate development and strategy, Richard Emerson, had offered to underwrite BayStar's own investment in SCO.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/more-microsoft-sco-links-emerge-339271604.htm

Has Microsoft's money been a significant resource for the financially ailing SCO?
Without a doubt. In early 2003, Microsoft started paying SCO what eventually grew to $16.6 million for a Unix license, according to regulatory filings. Only longtime Unix fan Sun Microsystems previously paid close to that, with a $9.3 million license deal.

Microsoft provided a second, though indirect, boost in August or September of 2003, when it referred SCO to BayStar Capital, a fund that arranged a $50 million investment.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-139743.html

There is a lot more evidence, but I will leave further research up to you.

I don't understand why you guys on facebook feel so safe...read this article. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google-Facebook-share-data-with-Plaxo-LinkedIn/0,130061733,339284989,00.htm Thank you for posting this article today! Very important information, of course myspace will never "announce" to the users that they are doing this. It'd be nice if they notified people in changes as significant as this one.

(Original AC that kicked off the sub-thread here).

I agree that mining is important (what do you think has kept us out of the recession?), and I would be more than happy to vote Liberal, if that were still their policy. But that doesn't seem to be the case. If he were against this scheme (like the opposition damn well should be), he'd have said so from the start, citing the mountains of evidence of how this is a bad idea and offering something else (like the old plan of "free filtering software available on request") - get the best of both worlds.

Besides, what can I expect of someone who has explicitly eschewed fiscal conservatives in favour of social conservatives (and is also notorious for his social conservatism)? If anything, he's more likely to back this legislation than Rudd. (FWIW, I'd have voted Turnbull in a heartbeat over Rudd, but he's gone).

PS. Yes, there are other issues I care about, but I feel that both major parties have done poorly on most of these - another reason to vote third party, if I can find a good one.

Here's an interesting article about how facebook, plaxo, linkedin, and google share your data: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Google-Facebook-share-data-with-Plaxo-LinkedIn/0,130061733,339284989,00.htm

4. Need to work out which politicians to buy.

That's easy. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is already sympathetic to their cause and should be available for a bargain price.

LOL reality must be biased too, then.

Remember how they "complied" with the - stupid - EU required ballot screen.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10363306-75.html

Remember how they basically discredited ISO with the ooxml "do this as word95" standard.
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-portes.html
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsoft-Office-2007-is-incompatible-with-OOXML/0,130061733,339288332,00.htm

And remember MS own internal memos, halloween documents and all.

Think of it as the linux version of the Mojave experiment.

People were told KDE4 was Windows 7

http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2008-05/ The AuDA isn't politically motivated, just covering their arse. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/auDA-No-govt-request-to-kill-Conroy-site/0,130061791,339300152,00.htm

No it's clear cut corporate intervention, unless you want to go for the standard conspiracy theory crap.

Considering how irritatingly slow auDA are at handling any kind of request (think a month to 6 weeks, yes I have witnessed this), I find it highly unlikely that they weren't at least prod'd into action via external forces (ie Senator Conroy or one of his cronies).

I guess it's not like they have a history of doing this... Oh right they do -> Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor critics

"this is clear cut government intervention"

No it's clear cut corporate intervention, unless you want to go for the standard conspiracy theory crap.

"We never used OS X as a source of inspiration in the design of Windows 7. This is completely uninformed. We used KDE 4 instead".

That's not far from the truth.

Or at least, if you tell people KDE4 is Windows 7, they believe it.

What's your point?

I beg to disagree.

Journalist stunts like this obviously feed the insightful notions of how dumb people generally are, and get remembered the most.

But please, computers aren't yet cars in terms of the minimal technical knowledge required. As much as I wished to argue that this should be so for whatever idea's sake, I clearly see that this is the case rather often than not.

Whoever nowadays owns a computer, is at least of sufficient means to afford one, and is necessarily sufficiently smart not to waste the money. Even those fairy-tale people who only use their PC for email are told to sit on their hands before they click, and the reasons why. If they go out into the internets at large, they very darn quickly learn to exercise discretion (after a visit to their nearest guy who earns his small wage fixing computers). Most importantly, online banking is really the way to go, with due amount of caution they learn to observe, even more quickly. Credit cards, amazon, anyone? Let alone the fact that any `grandma' has a `grandson,' who is very likely to care about mom's PC if she doesn't.

So perhaps those "50% of people [who] don't even know what Windows is", are either a gross overestimate, or they know nonetheless to check their bank's URL begins with https: regardless of what their OS is.

And, I have a lingering distrust towards people who never fail to no note that so much of our fellow citizens need improving, but that's an altogether different matter.

Install Kubuntu and just tell them it's 7.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Is-it-Windows-7-or-KDE-4-/0,139023769,339294810,00.htm

...it's news because Microsoft bragged on .NET being in the LSE for a couple of years, pointing to it as proof that they were enterprise-ready and such.

Then at about this time last year, the TradElect system (which was the .NET bits which ran the LSE) went 'splat', taking the London Stock Exchange down with it.

The relevant info should be sitting right there in TFA.

Google Apps/Gmail has gone down multiple times in the past several years. I suppose that means linux sucks? I mean sheesh, this Microsoft solution only went down one time in 3 years. Google/Linux couldn't even handle the lower-volume, less-stressed, less mission critical email market...

Implementation is the important factor.

Oh, and it's not like the linux based NYSE has never had an issue. Or the Frankfurt Exchange. Or the Australian Exchange. Or the Moscow Exchange. Or the Tokyo Exchange.

In fact, we have had 8 major failures of linux based exchanges this decade.

The separation of Telstra's wholesale and retail divisions has been discussed heatedly for many years, long before the change of government. The previous administration was happy to let it stand, which made Telstra investors happy but pissed off Telstra customers as well as competitors, not to mention holding back innovation. You only have to look at the number of times Telstra has lost in fights with the ACCC, the courts and even the government to see why this was a mistake.

The only group of people who are opposed to Telstra being split are the (unlucky) shareholders. Pretty much everyone else who has had to deal with Telstra are unhappy with their service and pricing, their treatment of retail customers and wholesale customers.

I'm not saying that the government's NBN plan is well-thought-out or anything, but Telstra's joke of a proposal and their juvenile "change the law to suit us or we take our toys and leave" attitude is even worse for the competitive landscape and the general Australian public. A split can't come soon enough.

Some years ago, the kernel development model version numbering had changed, and at some point Linus basically said there would probably not be an unstable 2.7.x series, ever, except that they might want to number the version after 2.6.99 2.7.0 instead of 2.7.100, just to keep the numbers short.

In all likelihood, 5 years from today, the kernel will still be 2.6.x.

In other news, Australia has submarines, fighter jets and even tanks and they also ban violent video games!

I'd like to see one of you conservative centre-left Liberal sympathisers defend that action.

Higher ups in the government intervened. Maybe Bloomberg will do the same.

I bet they head-hunted members of the Windows XP team to implement this in the UK. That can't be a coincidence. Great move guys...

Read what i wrote. I said they TRIED to implement this. They realised it's not feasible and chose the software option instead. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Porn-wars-episode-II/0,130061791,120273369,00.htm

nah... they'll just think it's windows 7 :p

CNet show firefox being substantially faster as of March in terms of browser performance. Admittedly firefox is a dog to start up, but that's one of the major goals for 3.6 last I checked. Having used the betas for a while, it's been a long time since I've felt I'm waiting on my browser as I did in versions 3 and particularly 2. I don't think anyone with a decent PC is going to be frustrated by the performance on 3.5, and with additional improvements already underway in trunk I don't think firefox is in any way falling behind. Oh, and how is private browsing broken in 3.5?

3) You are discussing replacing an $80 device when upgrading a $1500(+++) device, maybe you can find a deal.

4) Whole new battery system, hard to say one way or the other.

8) Apple servers have redundant power supplies. You clearly do not know what you are talking about:

# Output power: 750W
# Optional second load-sharing 750W power supply for redundancy

http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html

1,7,8) Who cares....I am sure if they had a valid comparison to make they would...Perhaps all of those companies would do better if they would take the time to contrast themselves with the competition....

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Red-Hat-CEO-Tired-of-Microsoft-s-Linux-whining/0,139023166,120205505,00.htm ....."'blue screen of death' does not refer to Linux systems, but rather to the immature Windows products." ...Sounds like a bash...Your google skills suck.

No way! Resell it as it is. They can't tell the difference anyway.

So how is life at Telstra these days?

Nice try, mate.

My comment about Optus/Singtel related entirely to the fact that Singtel is the Singapore government owned telco and Singapore certainly has no scruples about censorship which means that Optus participation may have a different corporate goal.

To be fair, Telstra, Internode and iiNet are on record as objecting to this proposal and all have refused to be sucked into this debacle and are not participating. Telstra's public comments have been generally to the effect that trying to censor the internet would be like "boiling the ocean"

This idiotic plan is not killed and dead. The Labor government in general, and Senator Stephen Conroy in particular, have been taken aback by the strength of the opposition. The article noted in the summary only covers some of the incompetent answers given to hard questioning by the main Opposition party and one of the minority parties.

Trials are still being underway involving 4 tiny ISPs, one medium ISP, one Christadelphian ISP and one large ISP majority owned by Singtel.

There is no engineering, vendor neutral specification giving trial design criteria or testing methodology as the basis for the trials. There is no requirement for the ISPs to disclose which method of censorship they selected. The ISPs have been supported to the tune of $AU300,000 but there is still a $AU887,000 consultancy contract for the testing and reporting of on a system to block up to 10,000 URLs. The IWF annual report lists between 1100-1300 sites blocked by their system. Rumour has it that much of the testing in the small ISPs is using equipment from the same censorware vendor but this is not confirmed as several censorware vendors have been lobbying for the windfalls. Watchdog, using the NetClean system was involved in some separate testing undertaken by another ISP, Exetel. The Exetel trial received a great deal of criticism in the Australian internet community and Exetel customers. The trial has not been cancelled and neither has the testing consultancy.

Any assumption that the scheme will disappear is premature.

A list of 1000s of banned films and publications is still in existence. The censorship regime has become more and more repressive over the last 10 years. Realistically the entire basis of censorship needs serious review. It is managed by more than one government authority under several different pieces of legislation. The proposed censorship of the internet is under the control of the telecommunications authority which is yet another government authority.

You would have to try very hard to find a more incompetent approach to anything to do with IT, networking or civil liberties all in the same package.

Japan is doing fine with the iPhone

Not really fine enough, NT&T cant sell them so they've been forced to give them away (I.E. take a loss on them). Australian Telco's took a serious loss on the iphone, but this is mainly because the Telco's made a deal with apple that fixed the prices and gave them razor thin margins, then the mining boom ended and the AUD lost 20-30% of its value and they couldn't renegotiate the price of the unit nor reneg on their advertised prices. That and the advertising didn't bring in expected sales numbers, Optus who sold 60-80% of Australian Iphones depending on who you believe took a loss of A$44 Million due to the iphone and that's with the iphone customers paying more for the subscriptions then non-iphone customers.

In that case, you might be surprised by the speed of IE8. Look up some benchmarks. Seems to be a little difficult to find non-beta benchmarks, but take this for what it's worth.

Anyway, I don't use IE6 for the same reason I don't use Opera 7 and Firefox 1. If speed is your concern, and you're using IE6, you've chosen the single worst performing browser in common use today.

I just realized I forgot to include a link to the article I mentioned about Gates. Here it is. It explains his idea of using computationally intensive challenges to limit the flow of large quantities of e-mail.

I thought I had included it, but I must have forgotten.

zdnet
neowin

products. Why try and trick someone into installing malware when Microsoft sells the latest version of Windows with built in backdoors for our governments to spy on us.

Well, some guys from ZDNet presented it as a Windows 7 beta and nobody noticed the difference.

4.2 works fine for me BTW and I switched to it from 3.5.10 for everyday use, but the former releases indeed were quite unfinished.

As already reported on Slashdot people don't know if it is Windows or not anymore.

If you stick with Windows you have to retrain them every four or five years, and if you switch from Windows you have to retrain them. So you have to retrain no matter what.

Of course with Open Source you get to set the schedule and work it into your budget. With Windows you get a year or two window that Redmond chooses for you to make the switch.

And to save everyone googling..

KDE 4 or Windows 7 - ZDnet in Sydney

How come bandwidth doesn't split exactly equally between individuals using the network? How does it happen that a bittorrent user slows down all the other users, as opposed to the other users slowing him down until everyone has exactly the same bandwidth? That seems the most equitable solution. Is it technologically unfeasible? why?

I'm not 100% sure on this, but no doubt someone with more clue will chime in if I'm wrong.

I think if you leave things to run their own way, the distribution will be "equal" but weighted by connections, not users.

Now, web pages use one or a handful of connections at most (one for the text and a few others for images - sometimes), and online gaming uses just one from the player to the server, but bittorrent opens hundreds or even thousands of connections per user (one to each peer). Every connection would be given even priority, but in terms of users, the bittorrent user is getting a weight of thousands compared to a weight of 1 for users of other protocols.

There are technological ways to fight this and the most reasonable seems to be QoS shaping, i.e. the network being configured so: "If there is plenty of vacant bandwidth, your bittorrent connections can have it all. But if a more important protocol demands some bandwidth, your bittorrent packets will be put at the end of the queue and they will be served first".

You might even set this up on your home router if you use bittorrent a lot, and also game or use VOIP telephony - so that bittorrent can run at full speed while you're asleep but gets shoved aside if you make a VOIP call, so that you can have enough bandwidth for a good quality conversation. The technology is old and is even supported now in many consumer grade routers.

Many ISPs, including (from TFS) Rogers do exactly this. What they're saying is that if in the future they're not allowed to do this, by law, then they don't know what they'll do instead.

The strongest suggestion here on /. is that one thing they could do, is stop selling a service like "20MBps unlimited" which is not supportable by their network if more than a small fraction of users actually utilise the full advertised features of the product they paid for. Instead, they could offer a service marketed as "sometimes 20MBps not really unlimited, but close enough for web pages and email and gaming" for that price, and keep the bittorrenters well appraised that "because this service isn't unlimited, really, we'll shape your downloads into oblivion - if you don't want that pay the full price for a low contention business grade connection".

The problem as I see it (although I live in Australia and am removed from the broadband situation on the North American continent) is twofold: one, that services are advertised as unlimited and they really aren't (and cannot feasibly be), which leads to all these issues of how much shaping is legal, what disclosure is required, how much overselling, etc.

Two, is that the amount of bandwidth used by plain old ma and pa customers is going up compared to 10 years ago - without bittorrent, people are watching videos on youtube, streaming TV from hulu, doing video phone chats over the net, uploading gigs of photos and videos to picasa, etc - not just downloading web pages at a few kb of text each like they used to. But, the ISPs still have the same network they did then, and even more customers than they did then as broadband becomes more prevalent.

In Australia the first problem is more or less solved, with the ACCC having successfully lobbied government to make it illegal to advertise plans with any kind of limit as "unlimited". So, they are sold as "20gb per month" with peak and off peak times clearly marked. This wasn't always so in Australia - in fact there was even a baseball cap made with the writing "I signed up for an unlimited Internet account with Telstra but all

While technically accurate the period in question involved a brief shutdown of napster due to court injunction and subsequent reinstatement.

More to the point, I was counterclaiming the parents assumptions and was not attempting to prove my example. The reference I made was to a slashdot posting a few years ago on the topic of Napster. You are right in that the decline of Napster and the decline of CD sales are not necessarily directly linked although I do think that they are. It's just hard to prove on any scale so I won't fault anyone for thinking otherwise.

Here's some evidence to back up what I've stated.

Kazaa cropped up shortly after all this happened so it's not linked to the issue at hand but there could indeed be one or many other external factors not being considered such as the quality and quantity of albums released during those times.

Oh I see

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/fullduplex/soa/Blog-Does-Conroy-s-FUD-make-a-Ludd-of-Rudd-/0,139033349,339295006,00.htm

1/ Using someone's computer without their permission is a criminal act

First there's the upfront sponsoring of criminal acts. Those supporting MS products are sponsoring anti-competitive and often illegal business methods. Second, Windows can be said to, in effect, be designed to make these takeovers easy, we can extend that observation: running Windows while connected to the net is a criminal act.

• 20 minutes - 2004
• 12 minutes 2005
• 5 minutes - 2008

Now those are from unpatched systems. However, many remote exploits are available for years before Waggener Edstrom / Microsoft even acknowledges their presence. Remember a bug exists, and can have published exploits, whether or not the company acknowledges its existence.

2% might not be much, but the rise (and fall) of linux (like all things in statistics) will be a bell curve. 2% is the bit where the graph starts to look pointy.

That said, first microsoft have to do something about the fact that half of their customer base can't tell the difference between windows 7 and kubuntu..

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Is-it-Windows-7-or-KDE-4-/0,139023769,339294810,00.htm

I am tired of the brown and want something with character. Personally, I think Windows 7 looks very good and I like its UI.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Is-it-Windows-7-or-KDE-4-/0,139023769,339294810,00.htm

"Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? In this video, we take to Sydney's streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration."

That looks great!

Nice style, looks good!

Very nice.

It looks much easier. Definitely.

I think its very good.

I'd use it ... the Vista was a bit hard for me to get user friendly with.

So does that mean we are going to buy MORE fake routers from china with hardwired security issues?

One would think that since we've been living in an Internet-connected society for a little over a decade (from a "Joe Average" standpoint) that people would no longer be that gullible. Alas, that isn't the case...

John Doe sees a tempting link in his email, or one served up in a web page a'la Phorm, and clicks on it. This then triggers the installation of "legalized" spyware which tracks the user's communications and browsing habits.

Amazing, the kind of tools and techniques that law enforcement and signals intelligence agencies are developing. Not that it would be hard: The botnet coders and operaters have already done all the hard work for them. Simply grab a sample of the 'bot and its controller software, and tweak it for your needs. Then, ring up the antivirus and security companies and have them modify their security applications to ignore the installed surveillance software.

Problem is, well-organized criminal organizations with the appropriate technical expertise are liable to discover the spyware anyway, and find a way to use it against the agencies responsible for its deployment (i.e., to send falsified "evidence" of their activities).

Not only that, it makes you wonder why governments blow huge amounts of cash on such technological "solutions" when the cybercooks can do the job for them for (essentially) almost nothing...

Senator Steven "Liar" Conroy. He has claimed over and over, that the Mandatory system he wishes to implement is of the same variety as what's in Europe. NSW calls Conroy on Euro filter fudge'

Which after a little searching one finds completely untrue. He has been questioned by other members of parliament and skirted around the issue by feeding the "Unwanted Material" line.

As not having a degree worked out ok for Bill Gates.
To quote wikipedia: "...Alma mater Harvard University (dropped out in 1975, honorary degree in 2007)..."

CNET: Bill Gates "graduates" from Harvard 30 years after dropping out

Internode and iiNet are the two awesome ISPs in this country, although there are lots of smaller ones. You'll want to avoid the ISPs that charge $180/GB on any of their plans for excess usage such as Telstra, Dodo or Optus. This is not a typo. That's 180 Australian Dollars for every Gigabyte you go over your allowance. For example, Optus's 'Yes Fusion $79 plan comes with 4 GB and $150 for every Gigabyte over that. Needless to say, they've got their had stuck up so far their own bottom that they can see daylight through their own ears. But even they completely oppose the plan.

A certain Mark Newton who works for Internode is also an extremely outspoken critic of the censorship plan. But Telstra, iiNet and Internode, likely 3 out of the biggest 5 ISPs all have important people saying that the filtering won't work.

Broadband Choice is an excellent overview of the choices out there. Check out Whirlpool if you want to know more about the situation.

Obviously not the same 4% that you work for

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-shunned-in-business-survey/0,130061733,339292397,00.htm?feed=pt_ie7

And before you go off into a rant - 4% is not acceptance, it's a margin of error.

For an idea of what its like to live in a country that has to get all of its internet data from USA / Europe, read this article, and watch the embedded flash video.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/communications/soa/Net-neutrality-is-an-American-problem-/0,139023754,339292161,00.htm

FYI I pay $70AUD (~$48USD) per month for a 1.5mbit / 256kbit DSL line with 40Gb of data.

This is from one of the more expensive / boutique providers in AU. You can get DSL a whole lot cheaper, but the quality of the connection, speed of downloads and support suffers greatly.

You can use this page to get an idea of what is available in AU.

http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/?action=search

Like I said, you can get DSL cheaper, but sometimes good things are worth paying for.

what else? outlaw encryption? so no one can use their bank online anymore?

If it were up to the Clinton appointed FBI Director Louis Freeh encryption would be outlawed, at least to the extent that the government would have a backdoor in any encryption scheme.

Remember when John Ashcroft defended encryption and was against Clinton wanting to listen to people's e-mails? Funny how things change so quickly when you get more power.