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Actually the half of Apple's argument that everybody (including Psystar) is forgetting is the trademark claims (if you read the complaint, there are about six - ranging from infringement to dilution to state unfair competition). And those are the easier claims to make than the copyright ones.

You can drive a Honda on any road you want. You just can't pull the Honda emblems off it, stick them on a bunch of 1985 Yugos and sell them as Hondas. The Trademark Act is equally tough with damages - it can include "treble damages" and attorneys fees. That will put Psystar out of business.

If this convinces Apple to offer a mid-range expandable desktop, I'll consider it a victory.

Since Apple's entire legal argument hinges on the fact that their EULA states that OSX can only be installed on Apple-branded hardware, it will be interesting to see if the courts uphold such restrictions in EULA's, or the existence of EULA's at all.

Way to dissemble. Apple's complaint "alleges copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, trade dress infringement and unfair competition." Source here.

In no way, shape or form could someone who has *any* knowledge of the complaint Apple filed claim that "Apple's entire legal argument hinges on the fact that their EULA states that OSX can only be installed on Apple-branded hardware." There's a lot more to it than that.

What's the issue? The first page of a Google search for "hd radio output jack" lists

HD Pulse with "Stereo Output"

Sony XDR with 3.5mm stereo output jack

JVC KT-HDP with a stereo out

Just plug the line out to your recording device of choice (digital or otherwise) and go to town.

Patents should give a significant contribution to the state of the art, in exchange for the temporary monopoly granted to the patent owner. I think you have a patent-worthy "implementation" when your description is

1)detailed enough that someone who knows the field in general can build the item without further instruction. For your example, that would be the average guy with a degree in CS.

2)not obvious in the sense that said average software engineer would come up with it within a few hours when asked for a solution to the problem. If it is likely that people would come up with the solution that fast, it is a routine engineering job, not a "significant contribution to the state of the art".
In this case, I think the full description of Tetris in 6. (barely) qualifies as "not obvious".

Also (and unrelated to your and GP's post), I think it makes sense to limit patents to areas where the innovation actually benefits society as a whole. That is usually not a case if it is merely a method for better marketing - that does not improve the products the customer gets for his money. This brings us to
3) No patents on business methods. Games look questionable to me in that regard... ...not sure if the above should have received a patent.

Overall, the USPTO (and in some cases the courts) have neglected all three of the above items. Which has led the patent system to its current sorry state. On 2) the Supreme Court has introduced somewhat higher standards in 2007, see http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6180220.html. But I doubt if that is sufficient to turn the patent system back into a useful institution.

That's too obvious. If you're going to make a "weapon" out of it, at least make a HERF gun. Don't even have to silver it for that ;)

If you are going to silver it... hmm, how perfect of a parabola is it? If it's good enough, or if you could machine it to that good of precision, you could use it as the primary mirror on a huge truss tube telescope.

Some details here. According to Apple, this is about quality. Here's a killer excerpt from the filing:

"Online commentators have reported that Psystar's computer is "missing stuff like iLife, Bluetooth. an IR receiver, DVD burning and the ability to update your computer," is "LOUD, Crazy Loud," it "breaks the OS' automatic updates," and that "video was DOA right out of the box. No signal going to monitor Boot up is moot point as there is nothing to see." Of Psystar itself reviewers have written "they have no quality control," "lousy tech support," and "All I want to do is return the computer and get a refund." Likewise, it has been reported that Psystar has repeatedly changed location, this its office could not be found and that its first on-line payment processor terminated Psystar's account."

Here is a slightly more informative (less speculative) posting: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9328

Yes they did.

And you're seriously trying to compare a bug in a largely obsolete parser generator that only runs on one version of BSD, with an entire OS that's so poorly written that it can't even last 5 minutes without being pwned?

You evangelists are getting desperate. No wonder Microsoft is having to spend +$300 million to try to persuade MVPs not to abandon ship...

The time of worry is over.

Lol...

Yes - http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html?hhTest=1
they - http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/03/windows_steals_top_server_os_s.html
actually - http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/32706.html
do - http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6041804.html

But thanks for coming out.

Exactly my thought. I'm also bothered that I had to go this far through the /. comments to see this very blatant gem pointed out. Item number 5 is a good case of pure speculation.

We were told the engineer could not reboot the computer. Now, I did not get confirmation that the train ran on Windows but it is telling that that would be anyone's first assumption.

(By the way, he describes himself as a "Security Industry Innovator". Wonder if that's really what he has on his business cards.)

For someone who was the Chief Marketing Officer for Fortinet, VP Research at Gartner covering security topics, and a holder of Gartner's Thought Leadership award for 2003, I'm really surprised by such a poorly constructed article. I'm also surprised (as others have pointed out) that when he was the technician handling the gift certificate kiosks (item #3), he couldn't figure out how to turn on the scheduler service and use the AT command in Windows NT. And why blame Microsoft because a third party vendor writes software that has memory leaks?

This shows they're a little kinder than MS, or at least have better PR.

Yous guys remember MS and SenderID? If it doesn't benefit them directly, they'd rather it not benefit anyone else. Brats. /sigh

Linux runs on more platforms and more CPU architectures needs citation? Are you stupid? Windows does what, Itanic, x86, x86-64 and if you stretch "Windows" (CE, AKA Mobile doesn't even use close to the same codebase as Windows proper, unlike Linux) maybe ARM? There are 11 alone supported by the Debian distribution, to say nothing of where the kernel actually runs. That's many more than Wind River or NetBSD actually support. They are embedded systems. Linux runs both embedded AND desktop AND big iron with the same kernel. No other OS can say that.

And for higher performance, identical software on identical machines runs faster under Linux than Windows.

BTW, NT only booted on Alpha and MIPS derivatives natively as a commercial product. SPARC support wasn't even done by Microsoft, it was done by Intergraph for a special contract. But guess what? They did that in 1995, and Linux had Alpha support in 1994. Guess you were wrong. And given that the first Linux kernel was very specifically x86 and was written in 1991, if you want to compare rates of development, I'd say that Linux is WAY ahead of Windows. Go troll your idiocy elsewhere.

http://www.baarf.com/

Enough is enough.
You can either join BAARF. Or not.

RAID-5 Write Penalty

"...If you later modify the data block it recalculates the parity by subtracting the
old block and adding in the new version then in two separate operations it
writes the data block followed by the new parity block. To do this it must
first read the parity block from whichever drive contains the parity for
that stripe block and reread the unmodified data for the updated block from
the original drive. This read-read-write-write is known as the RAID5 write
penalty since these two writes are sequential and synchronous the write
system call cannot return until the reread and both writes complete, for
safety, so writing to RAID5 is up to 50% slower than RAID0 for an array of
the same capacity. (Some software RAID5's avoid the re-read by keeping an
unmodified copy of the orginal block in memory.)"

RAID-5 Drive Failure
"Now if a drive in the RAID5 array dies, is removed, or is shut off data is
returned by reading the blocks from the remaining drives and calculating
the missing data using the parity, assuming the defunct drive is not the
parity block drive for that RAID block. Note that it takes 4 physical
reads to replace the missing disk block (for a 5 drive array) for four out
of every five disk blocks leading to a 64% performance degradation until
the problem is discovered and a new drive can be mapped in to begin
recovery."

Raid-5 Failure Rate Increases
As the number of disks in a RAID 5 group increases, the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, the reciprocal of the failure rate) can become lower than that of a single disk.

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

HTH,

HAND.

I think that you're partly right about the durability of goods, but there's so much more to Amazon's ability to extend the long-tail.

For one, there's the issue of quantity. If Amazon wants to guarantee stock on a really obscure book, it needs to have 1 or two copies of that book in one warehouse. If a brick-and-mortar wants to guarantee stock of the same book, then need 1-2 copies in every/most stores. For large brick-and-mortar stores, that could be thousands or even 10s-of-thousands of copies of that book. Of course... then you can add print-on-demand to the mix and that changes the picture quite a bit as well; then Amazon can stock 0 inventory of that book. But print-on-demand is another story, and applicable only to some categories (books, cds, dvds, etc).

Another big win is prediction. Amazon does a fairly good job of predicting demand and ordering accordingly. Additionally, in cases where demand exceeds local inventory supply, Amazon can generally request a drop-shipment from the supplier. While there's nothing stopping your local brick-and-mortar from doing the same thing, it's generally much more transparent to the consumer when a random brown box shows up on their door.

An interesting metric in the retail space is the number of "inventory turns" per year, which roughly translates to "how often do we completely empty and re-fill the items on our shelves". Amazon does it more than once a month (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8591); K-mart does it about 4 times a year. Walmart's closer to 7 times per year. Interesting, eh?

-A

LimitNone said it entered a confidentiality deal with Google to share trade secrets of its e-mail migration tool with Google engineers, sales people and key Google Apps customers.

Please look at my ZDNet column for additional references about this research work.

Crediting his ventures, he said he is in a "good place" financially and splits his time between well-appointed homes in Los Angeles and Monaco. He and wife Kelly Rutherford, an American television actress, have a baby on the way.

I'm not sure that LenE is the only one that has misunderstood it...

I read the blog post as identifying a new way to exploit the original "Carpet Bomb" issue with Firefox instead of IE.

I don't read anything about a new issue in Safari 3.1.2 in Rios's post.

ZDNet are reporting it as a new Apple issue: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1319

but I'm not sure they're right.

If I felt the need to research every argument made on Slashdot I'd have to change my lifestyle to one that no longer requires a source of income. Your argument - your onus to provide evidence.

Yes, I've monitored the speed with and without SSID broadcast. If you're going to ask me to run a series of obscure tests to determine that a particular protocol or application will be affected by x percent 4 times out of 5 I'm sorry, I'm not interested.

Now, do you have any documentation that demonstrates that speeds are adversely affected by disabling SSID broadcast by an access point?

Ya, it is: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=43 It's being broadcast while you're using the connection, no matter what your router is set to do.

It also don't matter whether or not the user even knows what firmware is, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ALTER HIS PROPERTY.

I can see why you don't understand the issues here if you stop reading at the first hint you disagree with something.

Man, new users are confirming my belief that people are raising dumber and dumber kids...

Fucking-a man, learn to google: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=43

As far as speed goes, you haven't NOTICED any problems. Did you actually benchmark your througput though? Hardware forums are filled with posts about these issues.

Fixed.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=473
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2008/06/09/windows-home-server-power-pack-1-public-beta.aspx

Um, don't be so sure. There's a lot of FUD out there, and much of it comes from the open source community as anywhere else. My point was not that these particular things constitute a 'release', but that there's a grey area that makes companies nervous. As for me, I'll stick with BSD, thanks a bunch.

Um, don't be so sure. There's a lot of FUD out there, and much of it comes from the open source community as anywhere else. My point was not that these particular things constitute a 'release', but that there's a grey area that makes companies nervous. As for me, I'll stick with BSD, thanks a bunch.

I've selected several photos of the future NASA robotic vehicles for your viewing pleasure.

"Microsoft's decision to add support to Office 2007 for the Open Document Format instead of its own OOXML office file format is due to backwards compatibility issues with OOXML, it has emerged."

"In Microsoft's announcement, the company said it was adding native support for ODF due to increasing pressure from customers "and because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF". The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work."

"Yes you are. The fact that SUDO hands off elevation to a USER LEVEL root account is exactly what I am talking about."

As I have said previously, it provides _root privileges_, not a root account, because (as I have also said) there is no root account on OS X by default.

"OS X users can even enable the root USER LEVEL account, and use it to login."

Why would it have to be enabled if, as you claim, SUDO uses it?

"There is NO SUCH USER LEVEL account type in Vista, even if you wanted to enable it."

You can however completely disable UAC, which turns a user with administrative privileges into what's effectively root. Different mechanism, same effect.

"Yes, but SUDO is not used on all OSes, so making a general statement would be silly."

It is however used on most UNIX variants, is available for all of them, and always has exactly the same default behaviour, so I can only take this as an "I didn't know that, but will pretend I did".

"The fact that OS X by default leaves ROOT OPEN for ANY AMOUNT of TIME, rather than based on SINGLE process request is the security hole."

It's shared by all UNIX variants that use SUDO in its default configuration, so continuing to single out OS X is disingenuous.

"Vista does not leave elevation open for a time period, as it processes security far more granular than ANY UNIX, including OS X. This means Vista gives SPECIFIC TOKEN based permission to the process elevation request, and NOTHING is left open."

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-201657.html

Doesn't seem to be helping keep the malware out.

"No they don't. The only subsystem that was put in place for backwards abilities was the Win16 (Windows 3.1) subsystem, and it hasn't broke applications for 15 years, and even then the only applications that were broken demanded to install hardware level access that is forbidden in NT."

This is a blatant piece of tripe, because Microsoft claimed 90% compatibility between XP and software written for NT or Win9X _written within the three years prior to its release_. They knew that there was a lot of stuff out there which made assumptions about the low-level structure of prior versions of Windows (especially Win9X) that would not install, run, or run reliably (symptoms varied). The XP Upgrade adviser checked for and flagged software MS knew was problematic, but with there was a lot of stuff out there they didn't know about which also had compatibility problems.

Windows Vista also has an upgrade advisor that detects and flags problematic software, so once again, Microsoft's claims and actions are at odds with your claims.

Lots of obvious stuff...

You are describing is what's know as a hybrid kernel or macrokernel. A nice Wikepedia article about them is here:

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

As you can see, the NT kernel is far from being unique in terms of using this particular design, and it isn't something Microsoft invented.

"You took this a bit too literal. I should have said an EMULATION sandbox. OS 9 on OS X is like running PearPC OS X on Windows now, it is an emulator running inside a constrained emulation sandbox."

As I said in my last post, Apple stopped supporting the use of OS 9 with OS X when they switched to Intel processors. When they did support it, it ran as a native PowerPC system on machines with PowerPC processors, so there was no emulation. Furthermore, Rosetta (which is an emulator) doesn't run OS 9 applications at all, so there's never been an Apple supported or Apple supplied emulator that runs OS 9 applications under OS X.

"SUA was a third party subsystem project to create a full UNIX subsystem."

_Interix_ was originally written by a company called Softway Systems, but Microsoft bought the product from them quite a while ago, so SUA (and it's prior incarnation as SFA) has always been a Microsoft pro

Guttmann on the other hand strictly relies on his defense that I never saw his slides and that I'm simply attacking an "out-of-date" version of Guttmann's writeup. But this debate has gotten to the point that people won't even bother to read what I actually wrote.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723#do-not-attribute-all-cpu-to-mfpmp

Guttmann on the other hand strictly relies on his defense that I never saw his slides and that I'm simply attacking an "out-of-date" version of Guttmann's writeup. But this debate has gotten to the point that people won't even bother to read what I actually wrote.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723#do-not-attribute-all-cpu-to-mfpmp

Guttmann on the other hand strictly relies on his defense that I never saw his slides and that I'm simply attacking an "out-of-date" version of Guttmann's writeup. But this debate has gotten to the point that people won't even bother to read what I actually wrote.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723#do-not-attribute-all-cpu-to-mfpmp

Now imagine sending 10 private emails to someone (Karel Donk) and the guy continues saying annoying and idiotic things. Then imagine you lose your temper and use some profanity in a private email. Now most people can get away with that, but someone like me who is a high-profile blogger at ZDNet should have known better to write that in an email. So Donk forwards my emails to Gutmann and Gutmann posted it on that link of his pretending like I was sending Gutmann harassment email. Initially, Gutmann posted it on his University web page but he took it down because it didn't belong there. So that was Guttmann's only defense that I referred to him as a moron in some email that wasn't even sent to him.

So I used profanity in a private email and it got posted without the full context. I should have known better and I won't make that mistake again. Guttmann on the other hand never conducted a single test, never even used Vista, and he presented a bunch of web forum postings as a scientific study from a respected university. That is by definition academic misconduct.

I explain how Karel Donk is one of Gutmann's primary sources here. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=723)

Anyhow, thanks for being logical and email me any time.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1415

So, now they want to point or shift blame away from themselves....

WHY did they have to break the winhlp32.exe file? WHY could they not bridge the functionality, or emulate it to work with "compatibility" mode only for pre-Vista apps. No, they probably wanted to screw over anyone (including help file software makers) to FORCE people to shift to Vista, when it looked as if XP was facing End of Life...

Is it any WONDER that the company is perpetually in paranoia/defense mode? As schizophrenic as that company is...

Uh, no, that's completely wrong. Unless you're suggesting that Eric Traut doesn't work for or speak for Microsoft. In the talk he gave, clearly MinWin was supposed to be part of Windows 7.

Uh, no, that's completely wrong. Unless you're suggesting that Eric Traut doesn't work for or speak for Microsoft. In the talk he gave, clearly MinWin was supposed to be part of Windows 7.

"This threat should be considered very serious because of the widespread distribution that Adobe Flash enjoys on the Windows ecosystem"

Shouldn't that be monoculture .. :)

1. Vista apparently cannot connect to a network for which it has been configured, if you turn off SSID broadcast.
2. Vista takes forever to connect to wireless networks, when compared to other operating systems.
3. Vista is more prone to dropping connection, etc.
4. Networking in general on Vista performs horribly.

I agree completely that the bigger issue in corporations is the energy used by the end-user. When you add up all the desktops using 200+ watts plus local printers etc, it really adds up.

I think there is a real future for thin-clients and some sort of centralized resources in the future, at least for larger departments and corporations. The costs of maintaining 100's or 1000's of PC's with licenses, administration, maintainence and energy costs is huge. If you can reduce that by thin-clients and virtualized servers, you could save a lot.

From ZDNet:

"The recruitment company, Reed, for instance, has reduced its PC power use by 80 percent by replacing 4,500 PCs and 400 laptops with 'thin-client terminals'. "

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-200543.html

1. Why is Google offering this product?
A: It's what we do...

6. If it's free, how does Google make money off Google Health?
...There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users' needs.

So they're just being nice guys I guess.

What I also found is... Health Care is a $2 Trillion industry, and that the industry spends $30 billion per year on marketing.

If Google cannot be up front about their motives, how can I trust them to be discrete with my medical records?

I think this is a lousy idea and I doubt it'll work. But the upside potential is so huge it's becoming easy to see why they made the investment.

This article seems to say that Vista is MORE secure than XP, or OSX.

Here's another good article about detecting Rootkits in XP vs Vista using antivirus suites and online scanners.

It is astonishing that Ms. Thomas's lawyer did not cite the case, because he definitely knew about it. And in view of his not having cited it, it was a violation of the ABA Rules of Professional Conduct for Mr. Gabriel to have failed to call it to the court's attention. See ZDNet article.

is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.

I don't think it's much of a shock to change the OS and the Office Suite used, it's not such a big deal. First off when most entities, whether people or businesses, get new computers more than likely the new system will have both a new OS, usually a new version of Windows, and a new version of MS Office. Secondly more entities are switch from MS Windows, to either Linux or OS X. For those who disagree with this, while the market itself is growing Macs and Linux are growing faster. After buying and using Windows since NT4 and 95 came out, about 20 months ago I switched to Linux and last summer I got the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on. For my office suite I use the native Mac port of OO.org, NeoOffice. It took me all of a week or two to adjust. Of course, just as I didn't use MS Office much, I don't use NeoOffice that much.

It is not about belief, it is about Anti-competitive behavior.

M$ has bought off Novell, and plans much worse than what we
are seeing here.

This is just the tip of the Iceberg.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/index.php?p=2369

An old Adage, Evil is as Evil does.

...and MacOS is the only commercial OS that has never had a zero day exploit in the wild

Wow... I cannot believe you said that out loud.

I would like to point out to you that your manual restore procedure -- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8759&page=4 -- is incomplete.

You first need to use pvcreate with the --uuid option to reinitialize the PV partition *before* you can successully do the vgcfgrestore, otherwise you'll get an error like "Couldn't find device with uuid 'abcdef-1234...'"

A google search for "microsoft sandisk percentage mp3 player market" turned up this article, which is the one I am pretty sure you are looking for.

I got the search terms right on the first try, and I was just fielding an educated guess. Don't wish, JFGI. d:

The big plus of Nexenta for me is that it is based on APT, whereas OpenSolaris (the distro) has invented yet another new package system (IPS). APT just works so well on Debian and Ubuntu that I don't want to use anything else, and for end users there are nice tools like Synaptic and Ubuntu's Add/Remove tool (which shows popularity ratings for packages as well). At least PCLinuxOS adopted APT while still using RPM as the package format...

My only real interest in Solaris is to use ZFS on a home NAS - having all that checksumming looks a lot more attractive now that disk sizes are getting so huge that, according to some, RAID 5 will stop being useful in 2009, due to the scenario of one disk failing and another one having an unrecoverable read error (URE) during the rebuild - see http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162. Without proactive scanning of the disk media for read errors before any failure, and checksumming that can hopefully correct some such errors, RAID 5 rebuilds after failed disks will increasingly fail due to UREs. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html as well for a much more technical view of the issues with RAID 5.

According to this blogger at zdnet, OpenSolaris is what Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up.

Yeah the title is flamebait but the article is very informative and provides screenshots.

And when I say screenshots. I mean camera shots of the screen?!??!?!

Did not have time to register...

Interesting how this comes on the heels of Adobe and Open Source maneuvers.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=571

Draw your own conclusions.