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A noted and famous hacker

With the addition of VoIP support, these mesh networks can now compete with the telcos on voice as well as data services.

I would have to disagree with that comment. Yes, these networks can now provide voice services, but they cannot effectively compete. In reality, wireless VoIP is still being developed and will most likely not be of acceptable quality for another year or so. Mainly, latency is the biggest issue to be conquered at this time. I think until they are able to reduce latency times significantly in these applications, it won't be widely accepted. It's just too frustrating when theres a couple seconds in between speaking and hearing a response from the other person.

Furthermore, while a mesh network can still carry a high data rate, the high number of hops to a wired connection from some locations along the network could make talking over VoIP rather unbearable. I imagine that on a larger mesh network you could experience latency upwards of 1000 ms.

I mean, these are made by professionals at a commercial company, and modelled on traditional carpentry.

There's an article at ZDNet about extreme amateur case modders/cooling enthusiasts. Far more interesting than some guy sticking mahogany on a Chieftec ATX

This is a sad day for the Internet: Google has truely shot itself in the foot. Where are the big banner ads? the pop-ups? Where are the unrelated search results, obfuscated by even more unrelated "sponsored" search "results"? And why is it useful? It's the sad truth, but alas Google is living in the past, instead of looking to the future. (- Insert obligotary "BSD is dead" parody here -)

Seriously though, wandering around on ZDNet, I found that Google has launched a personalized search engine. I tried it out, and I'll tell you what -- it kicks major ass. Let's say you are trying to look up information for a particular or specialized search term on the traditional Google, it may give you some random unrelated results, those of another domain you wish to consult about; on Google Personalized Search, you specify which domain you want to search about and it will provide you with more pertinent results. Kudos to Google, once again.

I guess the poor sales number should have warned me (since they only sold 3000 EggsBlockses in Europe, and 12 in Japan)

I was playing a game with it once, and it started vibrating, jumped right out of my hands, and severely wounded a small child.

ZDNet have an interesting article on this, with an analysis of the N-Gage 2's chances against the PSP and the GBA

Article here

The Australian magazine seems to have lifted heavily from the original article at ZDNet

Interesting. An article at zdnet suggests that the Witty was in fact a prototype, and could be the first example of cyber-terrorism. The combination of
a)The destructive payload
b)Time from disclosure to deploymentc)Large number of Ground Zero hosts
suggests capabilities far beyond that of an autistic 17 year old in his parent's basement. Could this be the start of internet based Al Quaeda action, that anti terrorism experts have so long stated was coming?

"And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It was interesting to see the depth of Caldera's intellectual capital."

http://www.osriskmanagement.com/about.shtml is pretty clear that Pamela Jones is staying with groklaw.

http://linuxpr.com/releases/6631.html is as well.

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/open_source_insurance.html doesn't mention PJ but is informative.

The simple fact stands that they have been the only people who have chosen to support what appears to be a SCO, an apparently criminal organisation. They have been the people who have sent people to be in a press conference with SCO.

On Zdnet we can find that their CEO, "Marsh was in San Francisco on Monday with SCO Group CEO Darl McBride".

Do not just boycott EV1. Boycott anybody who remains their customer after next month. Contact anyone you know who works with EV1 and tell them you do not believe in supporting SCO extortion.

Knowingly supporting such activities is in its self bad. Buying from thieves causes theft.

David Berlind can take 2,000 words to analyze a situation and leave you saying, huh? Leaving aside the poor editing and bad grammar, the content of this piece is highly suspect. Berlind has a history of writing fiction disguised as commentary. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/21712.html and http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/0,14179,2861123,00.html, among many others.

Dean's "team" got busted several times for sending email spam.

http://www.spamvertized.org/2004/dean.html.

That was enough to worry me about him - he obviously doens't understand the internet as well as he pretends to, or he wouldn't be sending spam. I have never given a spammer my business, so he pretty much shut down his chances of my vote at that time.

But when I read this article and the transcript of Dean's talk (.PDF format), the man really truely started to scare me. Expecting everyone to use an ID card every time they use a computer, or do damn near anything else? Requiring everyone to carry a national ID card? Sorry, no thanks. The man is clueless.

You mean Merced?

We saw this coming with the Yamhill rumors.

And where would we be without stupid pundits?

for better understanding of what "on teh spoke" means.

See this article.

For the precedent, look here

From ZDNet

Gotta love /. editors.

the slashdot effect

Here's an article about geeks who haven't had enough caffeine. Very funny. Enjoy.

Get it here

Lets be clear on this: SCO has never even claimed to have Unix patents.

And the message was: "We hold more patents than any other company in the world, and we can cut you off from all your revenue with just 4 of our patents. If the judge doesn't like those, we'll find 4 more. Welcome to the big leagues."

"And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++"

Darl McBride, SCO

WTF?! It's true, he said that. Read more here and here

I Come Not to Praise Linux...

..written in 1998 (all links I believe are dead for this ZD article).

Claiming to be an "engineer", Mr. Surkan lures Linux people into responding either directly or to his survey. The information is then apparently used when discussing Microsoft products with companies that are using Linux or considering the use of Linux.

Mr. Surkan uses a similar technique for any market area for which Microsoft has a vested interest. Not just Linux.

You can read more: http://linuxtoday.com/news/1998111802110PS

The link I think is dead in the post... but look at the comments.

More...
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/23/2056205.shtm l

More... (guy really needs a psuedonym)
http://cma.zdnet.com/texis/techinfobase/techinfoba se/+0wo_qr+W_88Ks/zdisplay.html
(pay site link to original article)

Dig deeper and you find a lot more... a WHOLE LOT MORE. This guy has more titles than than the Library of Congress.

You can supposedly give input directly via email to lnq@microsoft.com or msurkan@microsoft.com

Wow. I am utterly amazed at how few people know about this flaw.

Alrighty then. Go here and read all about it.

how about this one?

No, SMB is and always has been a very published spec.

Are you intentionally lying? Or just ignorant?

SMB is not an officially published spec. Notice how that informative page you linked is not provided by Microsoft, and in fact describes the fruits of external reverse-engineering efforts.

(In recent years, pressure from successful reverse engineering projects has pushed Microsoft to reveal partial protocol details. But they're not complete, and it wasn't "always" published as you claimed)

By claiming that SMB is a published spec, you denigrate the enormous effort put in by Trigdell, Allison & cohorts to puzzle out how it works, often dropping down to the level of sniffing ethernet packets.

For further verification that "reverse engineering" is a COMPLETELY VALID description of Samba's development history, see any article, interview with one of the authors, including one conducted on Slashdot. Or just read their own mailing list even.

I was curious, but they're not coming anywhere near where I live: Durham/Research Triangle Park. They've covered LA and Dallas, but come on - they are nowhere near my other home town - Washington DC (often rated #3 in the nation)

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these jokes!

Links to Jokes are all around us!

95% of all software companies disagree, including giants like IBM and Microsoft.

Actually, companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP have been making strong pushed to move to a services-based model. It's called on-demand computing and is the point of all of that computing-as-a-utility and grid-computing hoopla that we've seen in ads and articles recently.

Will they still sell their own operating systems and hardware? Sure. But, as we heard in Jim Gray's talk, the real money is in people's time, which translates to a service model.

This is sort of funny how this is being portrayed. So...the liberals are attacking the conservative media, eh? And Trent Lott, who is sponsoring this move against the new FCC media rules, is such a liberal.

Here is a decent article from ZDNet that explains why CONSERVATIVES are even against these new rules:

Why the FCC is wrong on media ownership
by David Coursey

SCO's complaint relies heavily on a 1985 license agreement between AT&T and IBM. While SCO's complaint quotes extensively from that agreement, it makes scant mention of the "side letter" to that agreement, which SCO filed as Exhibit C to its complaint. That side letter expressly permits IBM to create new products using "ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques" found in the UNIX code, as long as the programmers creating the new products do not (1) copy code from UNIX or (2) refer to the UNIX code or manuals in creating those new products. In addition, on page 2 of the side letter, AT&T agreed that "modifications and derivative works prepared by you [IBM] are owned by you." Thus, unless IBM actually copied UNIX code into its Linux contributions rather than re-coding the ideas it found there, its contributions to Linux were probably proper.

You must have missed the part about there being no backward compatibility. The only people who are going to be able to read your shiny new M$ DOC are people with shiny new M$ OS AND a network connection that can see your shiny new M$ $erver. It's going to be harder than ever to share Microsoft crap. Your impression, that you have any choices, is the false one Microsoft would like you to have.

So is your impression about data secruity. This nice little article shows how Microsoft is going to be watching your every keystroke. Witness the "research pane" that pops up next to your documents with relavent stuff. Microsoft is morphing into the biggest spyware application ever. What else would you expect from people who have always considered your desktop their billboard to be bought and sold?

This is hardly new. We use StarOffice 5.2 at work, and it cannot open password-protected documents from Office 95 or 2000. This is amongst the least problems when using that package in a mixed Office-StarOffice environment.

Eliminate the painful end of things and you will have far fewer problems, large and small.

BTW, a tip for you. You can order bound manuals for the Pentium I/II/III/4 directly from Intel's website AT NO COST. Apparently, this is a result of their deal with the justice department to resolve possible anti-trust charges. They take a month or two to get, but they are nice manuals with plenty of detail.

PUUHHleeasse. Why bother with Intel when AMD offers the same deal? Quit obscuring the truth!!! Surely any company who can deliver a superior, innovative, reliable product has something to hide!

I'm not buying it...

p.s. If you must belong to the dark side, follow along with that other sheep.

In regard to open source products, depending upon the facts, open source developers may seek to enforce their legal rights civilly, or, in cases where there has been willful infringement and certain criminal thresholds have been met, criminal prosecution may also be warranted. At this time, we are unaware of any referrals to law enforcement for open source license violations. As for reporting potential criminal infringement to law enforcement, the best way to do that is to contact your local FBI office.

So how much is this piracy worth. Lets take the man hours involved in creating the product as it stands and multiply it by the average cost of a developer. This will give us a per unit cost X. Then we need to multiply it by the number of people who have sourced the product from SCO and then also the number of people that they passed the code onto. Then we will have our damages figure and then we (not me I'm not a US citizen) should report the blatent crime to the FBI and let them persue it as they said they would ( as long as the damages are sufficient enough )

Additionally we should report this blatent piracy to software industry watchdogs such as the BSA and FAST

As the whole industry knows Piracy is a Bad Thing TM they should be keen to act. :)

I'm surprised this article was not posted, it is very factual:

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/mai n/0,14179,2914364,00.html

Certainly many (in fact, most) OSS-savvy IT industry workers I have come across think Apple is merely using open source for a free ride. Certainly Bruce Perens thought so, and Richard Stallman very pubicly rejected Apple's licensing efforts and questioned their intentions. The Free Software Foundation even boycotted the company. These comments have reinforced IT scepticism of Apple Computer and acceptance of Apple technologies in this field remains close to nil. ZDnet's Evan Leibovitch points out many problems with Apple's (lack of) efforts in Open Source's Black Hole, problems which still remain more than 2 years later.

Your question is good because it would be interesting to see if Bruce's opinions on Apple are still the same, and does he now think the company is genuine? Has it given back a sufficient amount or is it paying lip service only?

...check out this link for draconian DRM.
Buy a new computer...and kiss all your music files goodbye!

While I agree with your interpretation being more likely if it was just mozillaquest and Blake Stowell, I think you also need to read McBride's comments in the context of the entire paragraph which he gives.

The most relevant part is "And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. It was interesting to see the depth of Caldera's intellectual capital.".

Now that is ambiguous too, but it isn't clear to me that he isn't claiming C++

In this zdnet article (who else!) from 2002, Darly Baby says:
"And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously"
Watch yer arse Stroustrup! Darls coming to get you!

It seems to me like the LSB was really looking for a problem Debian already solved better.

What do you guys think? This looks like the first killer app for bluetooth to me.

I completely agree. I was originally thinking about getting a Tungsten C (read: without Bluetooth) and this is making me reconsider. This is exactly what the technology needed - a good kick in the pants.

Why is this unique to bluetooth? Why not any old wireless technology?

I've looked online for the differences between Bt and 802.11b -

Bluetooth works at 720kbps - Wifi at 11mbps
Bluetooth is geared towards point-to-point - Wifi network oriented
Bluetooth has a smaller power requirement

Bah, read for yourselves

..to get away from calling it Linux. Richard made some pretty good points in a recent editorial at ZDNet. GNU/Linux aside, maybe its time to stop identifying with the kernel so much and start naming the specific system. As in:
Mandrake
Red Hat
Debian
Gentoo
FreeBSD
GNU/Linux system
Open Source movement
GPL

At least that way Red Hat could be Red Hat and these hackers could just be open source nuts or GNU/Linux terrorists. Or maybe not.

What are you talking about? Read this article, linked on the page from Hall's article: here

it is clear, salient, insightfull, accurate and calm. Its not 'his precious' gnu - its the 'ideas' hes trying to preserve.. make sure people understand what Libre Software is... thats his goal.

"I shudder whenever he opens his mouth. He really does make us in the free software community look bad."

Give me a break pal, this anti-rms crap is a little obvious. your trolling for 'corporate american acceptance' of GNU/Linux (for what reason i dont know) -- but really, your just a little over the top with the adhominum attacks.

Look, over there, RMS was the subject of an article published in a (shock/horror) communist newspaper - gasp! Run and tell the Department of Homeland Security, or Local Chamber of Commerce, or Mr. McCarthy himself!

These meet most of your specifications. Except of course that they use the evil "Windows" OS from Uncle Bill.

> there is no GNU/BSD

"Today, GNU runs with various kernels including Linux, the GNU Hurd (our kernel), and the NetBSD kernel. It is basically the same system, whichever kernel you use [...] today it also runs with two BSD kernels"

When you assert "there is no GNU/BSD", are you saying that RMS is a liar or a cretin?

print version of same article (sans navigation, cruft, etc... plus its easier on the zdnet website).

This article?
LTSP brings Linux to X Window desktops
eWeeks Roger Hartje reviews the Linux Terminal Server Project 2.08, a hassle-free way to migrate to back-end server-based computing.
Full Story

"This content has been removed.
By This content has been removed., Enterprise "

I think letting "I hate Microsoft" or "I hate open source" sway your decision is unprofessional

The 802.15.3 standard for High Rate WPANs also operates in the 2.45-GHz band and at similar rates, from 11 to 55 Mbit/s, but is designed for shorter-range (1 to 50 meters), very-low-power operation. It also uses time division, multiple access (TDMA) protocol.

Bluetooth's focus on eliminating wires means still having the limitations of wires in that you can only connect between nearby devices. 802.11 on the other hand takes advantage of the Internet and allows you to connect to any device, anywhere