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Your licensing page[1] for the Flash and Flash Video file formats
states that the license "does not permit the usage of the
specification to create software which supports SWF file playback."

Why does your license prohibit the creation of playback software?

The reason I'm asking is that in April of 2002, in an article written
by David Becker[2], it seemed clear that Macromedia was committed to
making the Flash file formats be open file formats. In the article,
"Kevin Lynch, chief software architect for Macromedia," stated that
the Flash file format was open for all developers:
  "The file format has been open for years now, so people can build
whatever software they like around it," Lynch said. "We feel it really
needs to be open and to promote an ecosystem where people can build
software on top of it...We believe that's the best way to keep the
player successful and still provide access to developers."

[1] http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/
[2] http://www.zdnetindia.com/techzone/trends/stories/ 9,53742.html

the short answer is: no, you still can't make playback software using
our file format specifications. by making the file format open, our
intent is to allow 3rd parties to make applications that output SWF and
FLV. however, for optimal support and experience, SWFs and FLVs should
play in adobe's flash player. we have no plans to open-source flash
player itself. we rather like making it ourselves. :)

Xen cannot run Windows

To be sure, it doesn't work well yet. But its a far sight from "we can't prove it or tell you how to do it." If Xen development continues at the rate it has been going, its only another six months or so away before its reliable. Maybe less. Xen is very much a contender for this.

The initial claim.

There are people who talk about this.

You can also find support issues concerning the topic in Xen related devel newsgroups.

It's not an Intel motherboard, it's an Intel *chipset*.

unless you have some other datapoint, i think it's pretty clear it's an Intel motherboard.

A year ago a exploit was found in Excel that would allow remote code execution on a Mac, it stretched back even to many earlier versions.

Now we have a exploit on Norton Anti-Virus that will allow takeover and privilege elevation on a Mac.

http://www.zdnetindia.com/insight/commentary/stori es/132034.html

Here are some other exports of their products from their own mouths.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/secu rity/SymantecAdvisories.html

There is no sane reason to use OfficeMac on a Mac, Appleworks will read and write Excel and Word files, it's only the weak untrained sick puppies that are scared of their jobs who use OfficeMac. Anyone with a brain can achieve the same result with much safer software.

Here is another interesting read http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/features/stories/ns l,125682.html

Actually, I'm not too sure they are talking about HDTV CRTs. The "traditional tube TVs" (their words) they are talking about might be analog NTSC/PAL CRTs. The article doesn't make this clear. Note that "they" are from India, which seems to have very little HDTV content available. The article goes on to say:

Flat-panel sets and digital programming go hand in hand. The screens on flat-panel sets can better accommodate the high-resolution picture offered by HDTV, so combining the level of detail that comes with a digital signal with the large, thin screens of flat panels means an enhanced viewing experience.

An article from the Hindustan Times ("HDTV: Bigger, better but at a price") says that HDTV "could touch the lives of high-end consumers in India by 2007."

Buyers of HDTVs in India might be seeing the enhanced artifacts of 720x480 video that are less visible on a non-HDTV CRT. I wish the freakin' article had more details.

boycott ZDnet India!

What about walmart contracting almost all the stuff from China ? Look at the mills closed in SC as an example. The simple reason: money. I don't recall people crying so loud when everything is imported from china. I feel really ashamed when my gap jeans says make in mexico from us components.

People - get the facts - its always been the money. Hell its happening even in India , stop whining about job loss and sharpen your skills instead for a better chance at the market.

Even though DDOS attacks are misuse of an Internet service and illegal, some of the tactics SCO have used in this case are very dubious too. Claiming ownership of chunks of a kernel without showing any proof and not waiting for the outcome of a court case.

The damage they have caused companies involved in Linux far outweight a bit of network outage, unless they suffer a major loss since statistics say 80% of businesses that suffer a major outage go out of business within two years. We can always hope :)

Link to 80% statistic

Did you know your PDA can also become your phone? Its true and this type of thing isnt going to stop there. You'r PDA may one day function as the remote control to your media collection in your house/car/workplace or tempreture control in home/car etc.

Check out this PCMCIA GSM mobile phone

And the mobile phone in a CF Memory card

PDA's arnt dead. Nor will they be in the short term. PDA's will adapt to become other devices such as mobile phones and remote controls with more hardware and software functionality built into them and also in the form of PCMCIA and other such technologies.

And lets not forget the people who try and combine the functionality of the phone and PDA into one clever device!

I like the phone ad-on idea though (CF/PCMCIA)!

why is this troll modded up? the dot com crash and the terrible economy killed the IT job market. H1B visas aren't killing it and even if they were this issue is being addressed: H1B visa cut to hit infotech industry
it's almost impossbile to get a job over here without at least a masters degree and honestly if companies can get a masters student for half the price your average american BS grad will accept who can blame them. Do we have the right to be employed at a high salary just because we were born here?

The primary appeal of Linux is low cost: $0.00. with Windows being free in India, the typical Indian will not be interested in using Linux. Windows has significantly more applications that run on it than Linux. Off course, those applications are also "free".

Similar comments apply to China. China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan) is the software-piracy capital of the world. More then 90% of the software used in China is pirated. Here are some references to solidly support the aforementioned observations.

1. "Software piracy rising again in India, Microsoft official says"
2. "Business Software Alliance"
3. "Grey area: India 16th on global software piracy watch list"

The last I heard Novell was going to challenge SCO on Unix ownership.

They sure are, according to this article.

Cheers -- Quothz

smoke crack much? Google "Trink Guarino" IBM and there are news stories on ZDNet, among others, referring to her as an IBM spokeswoman including references to this page.

So I think that could be a real press release...

• You cannot trust the From: line! A whole lot of spam looks like it's from a Hotmail account based on the email address in the header. But this is almost always forged, and it says nothing about the actual service used to send the email. Most times, the mail is sent via an open proxy, usually in an uncontrolled network. Korea, China, Argentina, Nigeria, Brazil are all very good sources of open proxies. In other words: Do not think for a single moment that because the spam says it's from abcd123@hotmail.com that it had anything whatsoever to do with Hotmail!
  
  
• Mail sent using HTTPMail, the proprietary WebDAV interface that this article referrs to, will always have an easy to spot Received line that contains "with DAV;". It will also have an X-Originating-IP: [a.b.c.d] header that can be trusted. Note that sometimes the spammer will try to forge a fake X-Originating-IP, but it will usually either have the wrong capitalization (Ip vs. IP) or it won't have viable IP address numbers, usually with dotted quads greater than 255. It will also usually have an X-Originating-Email header that identifies the actual account name. Because of this, anyone dumb enough to spam with this method gets the account they used shut down almost immediately. In contrast, open proxies leave no evidence whatsoever of the actual originating party of the message.
  
  
• It is hardly a secret. For example, there's an open-source Mail plug in for OSX that lets one send/receive mail with HTTPMail. Additionally, there are Windows utilities that create a pop3-HTTPMail gateway, allowing you to read hotmail that way.
  
  
• As of March of this year, you can only send 100 emails per day per account using this method. Slashdot covered the story when the change was made. Here's a link to one version of the announcement.
  
  
• For the above reasons, you won't get a lot of spam from this service. I just grepped my known-spam folder with about 2000 messages for the last 6 months or so, and found FOUR such HTTPMail-delivered spam -- and they were all from msn.com addresses/accounts, not hotmail.
  

Reliance is not India's first CDMA network. Others have already deployed networks that are showing signs of growth; in places like Chandigarh, for instance, the number of mobiles have outstripped the number of landlines for the first time in India. Reliance Infocomm's troubles are only partly because of regulatory concerns; the other more significant problem is that its distribution network for the phones is showing signs of failure.

Not that the telecom regulatory rules are okay, (here's a very interesting and candid interview with the telecom minister on the tussle and other aspects of reform), but let's not write off Reliance that easily. They are one of the largest Indian companies around and have succeeded even during the (socialist, insulatory) Licence Raj period in the petrochemicals industry, traditionally considered closed to private sector participation.

They've had some massive lobbying effort in Indian political circles; Roads and Buildings Dept employees often complain how they get calls from their political masters in the middle of the night because they threatened to go against Reliance Infocomm's country-wide road-digging and laying of optical fibre network (a process which, while admittedly professional and impressive, apparently bends a few rules here and there).

Let's face it:- these people are powerful enough to make rules for themselves. They won't give up so much investment without a fight.

are politics.

Unemployed ? READ ON....
These two articles say it all -

"...The total export of Indian software and hardware was in the tune of over $7 billion in the year 2000-01..."
http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/national/stories/73 349.html

In contrast, CNN's website says, the cost of war with Iraq could be $50 billion to $60 billion (or as much as $100 billion to $200 billion depending on the duration)
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/31/sproject .irq.war.cost/index.html

*** Guess now you know what to call your senators for, if you want jobs.. ***

Today on ZDNet:
Indian animation market is suddenly waking up to a host of global opportunities that promise a lot of action for the country's leading design specialists
Read the entire article here

IBM will soon join HP(Compaq) in selling Linux pre-loaded PCs in India.
For details, read the story on ZDNetIndia IBM mulls Linux for its PCs

and before I forget, I had a dream last night. I talked to Bill Gates and he said "I am getting really tired of these antitrust cases. I am moving to India to become a monk!"....
Later in conversation, Bill Gates seemed concerned with Indians hitting /. He said "Slashdot is now really beginning to corrupt the mindsets of Indian techies. They are now swamping slastdot website like Americans do at 6-9am Thanksgiving sales!!"

IBM will soon join HP(Compaq) in selling Linux pre-loaded PCs in India.
For details, read the story on ZDNetIndia IBM mulls Linux for its PCs

and before I forget, I had a dream last night. I talked to Bill Gates and he said "I am getting really tired of these antitrust cases. I am moving to India to become a monk!"....
Later in conversation, Bill Gates seemed concerned with Indians hitting /. He said "Slashdot is now really beginning to corrupt the mindsets of India techies..."

IBM will soon join HP(Compaq) in selling Linux pre-loaded PCs in India.
For details, read the story on ZDNetIndia IBM mulls Linux for its PCs

and before I forget, I had a dream last night. I talked to Bill Gates and he said "I am getting really tired of these antitrust cases. I am moving to India to become a monk"....

IBM will soon join HP(Compaq) in selling Linux pre-loaded PCs in India.
For details, read the story on ZDNetIndia IBM mulls Linux for its PCs
Bill Gates needs a change of career or perhaps needs to move to India and become a monk ...

I think you are refering to the Monte Carlo method of Pi calculation. Its specifically called the "Buffons needle" method. There is also a cool screensaver that utilizes this method to calculate Pi! Sweet, even in an idle state, my computer can still do something allmost useful!

The guy who reposted the article on LinuxFormat should have posted both pages. Page 2 is good enough that I have to retract the word "hack", even if I regard the use of the word "pundit" as at best, ill-advised. But I suspect that the author couldn't say what he really wanted to say about "investor analysts" in the article.

The important lesson that seems to have been missed is... learn enough about the underlying technology to understand whether or not the business model makes sense or not through one's personal analysis, don't make an investment decision based on what the "pundits" say.

So the entire printing industry is going to change over from supporting PDF as an input format that supports everything up to and including embedded job ticket and billing information because Microsoft said "Boo!"

All of us are immediately going to go out and deinstall Acrobat Reader or whatever we're using to read PDFs and buy Office 11 (changing to XP to do it) because all the terabytes of PDF only content are going to magically morph into XDocs.

Yeah, right.

Even if the format is in fact superior, PDF is so much a part of Internet and print and other technologies that it would be years before XDoc content became noticeable enough to make it worth the trouble for end users to download and install a reader.

A company who makes its docs available in XDoc format only means that only Office 11 users will be able to read it. All that company will get as a result will be trouble from angry users. People aren't going to upgrade to Office 11 just to read some company's docs.

However, it does present an investment opportunity for making money off the stupid who are unloading Adobe because they actually believe this bullshit, just like the pre-announcement of the MS antitrust decision did... people snapped up $93 million in MS stock in response to that pre-announcement, including the slashdot readers who got to the pre-announcement from here.

I was wondering who the "pundits" cited in this article were. That's a word that only marketdroids and a few hack journalists that know no better use. The original of this article which was posted without attribution at Linux format can be found here.

Well, the "pundits" exist, a search on XDocs at google reveals this.

Here's a somewhat better article hereWell, the same investor analysts whose stock hyping and premature panic that drove the rise and fall of the bubble are in hype mode now. Apparently, since their understanding isn't past the buzzword level, they just don't get how embedded PDF technology is in American business and particuarly industrial segments like printing.

With the right apps, I can send a PDF file to a printer that can be turned into a gigantic print run without human intervention. If XDocs is all that Microsoft hopes for and enjoys the results that Microsoft wants and comes out on time, I might be able to do the same with XDocs by 2010 or so.

Remember this next time you're tempted to make an investment decision based on what a "pundit" says. Then check the facts yourself, you might make a lot more money by doing the opposite.

While the software side of things seems to be pretty similar to that of the Zaurus (Lineo Embedix, Trolltech QTEmbedded/Qtopia, Insignia Jeaode JVM, Opera, Hancom Office suite) there are some important hardware differences. Rather than any of Intel's StrongARM based chips they're using an Hitatchi SH7727[PDF] and are citing USB Host Control as a capability of the device. I'm an owner and big fan of the Linux-based Zaurus, but the SA-1110 leaves a lot to be desired when USB connectivity is concerned. It can only act as a slave device and the silicon has numerous bugs and conflicts with general USB support and the USB CDC Spec (just check out Intel's own docs on the chip if you want to check up on this). This causes great problems with connectivity. The SA-1111 companion chip adds USB Host capability and some other nifty features, but is not used in any Linux handhelds that I know of. It would also increase size and power consumption if used. It will be interesting to see how the SH7727, with it's similar approach to "handheld on a chip" functionality stands up against Intel's offering. It could end up showing the Pro's and Cons of these chips at the core of the devices more than the handheld as a whole. There's also more info on India's movements into the handheld market here

That's fine, if that's what you want to do. Don't use Redhat, then.
Everyone who said "Open source is about choice" is right. Redhat chooses to make these changes to the source, something they have every right to do. You can choose to reverse these changes, if you want to use Redhat. You can choose to use Suse if you want a more "default install" distribution. You can choose to use Debian if you want even more control, or you can Roll your own Linux.

What you must realize, though, is that if you want Linux to be widely accepted, supported, and user friendly, a common user interface is a must. Red Hat is taking a step in that direction, and this probably also cuts support costs (as someone in the article mentioned). Red Hat isn't taking away your right to customize, they're just providing a different default customization. You can still make the choice, rather than some committee. Remember, some committee made the original Gnome/KDE default choices.

China is really waking up to the language barrier. China has woken up to the competition it faces India. It has already introduced English in Primary education. Here, India is getting very hostile to China's competition to India's crown jewel. In fact, the hostility is so high, that the entire media here had made an issue of allegation about the chinese company, Huawei Tech links with the taliban. The Indian software industry dissmisses it threat.

One point and two misconceptions, more like.

(1)(a). Mainstream scientific computing is done on big iron made by someone other than Intel. Solaris SPARCs are used a lot, for instance. My grad school days in Astronomy and Physics were spent on SGI Octanes (yummy).

(1)(b). You seem to have fallen prey to the MHz myths. Have you used a recent G3 or G4? The PowerPC architecture is *built* for heavy duty mathematical precoessing.

(2). Well, alright, point there.

(3). Sorting through this jumbled mass of points was a barrel of laughs. True, OS X won't go x86. And true, Apple makes a lot of money from hardware, thus supporting the lack of a port. Of course, this means that MS support can't send me to Intel and Intel can't send me right back to MS. If it's broke, you have only to make one call. That's as may be. Point me to reports of Apple alienating developers. They've spent loads of time and resources helping developers move to Cocoa. In fact, that's what Carbon is for. They also provide one of the best Java VMs out there. Apple is embracing (as in welcoming, not as in extending) the technology, rather than trying to quash it or "standarize it" out of existence. They even provide a Cocoa API for Java, should you wish to optimize further. They are bringing more developers on board, while making the trasnition from Classic to OS X as easy as possible. If anyone is alienating developers with their new OS, it's Microsoft.

They have a government sponsored distro there called Red Flag linux. A web search didn't readily identify any stats as to how many copies were installed, though I found one article that indicated that 10% of new PCs in China are sold with Linux preinstalled and that in 2000 about 40,000 copies were sold in software stores. But as you noted, the number of copies sold =/= the number installed, especially in China.

Search google
Click on second or third link
Ta da
Solution

(for the paranoid goats)
http://www.zdnetindia.com/help/howto/stories/19027 .html


Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"

There's no end to the bad things that can be said about Microsoft. Poor internationalization isn't one of them.

That may be true for Hebrew. In 1998, Microsoft refused to translate Windows into Icelandic, even when the Icelandic government offered to pay. They only relented after a lot of bad publicity and threats of legislation from the Icelandic government.

Icelandic is a language with a quarter of a million speakers and a national government on its side. If they have difficulty negotiating with Microsoft, then what hope is there for the 90% of languages with less speakers and no government support?

Sorry to argue with your point, which you may have only meant to apply to Hebrew, but this is one place where I think non-free software can be really bad. Even if companies offer some support for a language in one version of a product, there's no guarantee that they'll continue supporting that language in future. Minority language speakers are left in a state of precarious dependence. On the other hand, free software can offer the chance to have sustainable support for a language, as long as there's a single fluent speaker willing to put in the time.

Although the company has removed the 'messengerA2Z' client from thier web site, you can still get a copy here at ZDNet India, if anyone wants to check it out and see how it works (or download it now in case it goes away forever.)

ZDNet India also has a story regarding all-in-one IMers.. and MessengerA2Z is listed.

The download for the file is listed near the middle of the page (for the lazy people: click here :)

-------------------

If anyone is interested, ZDNet India still has a copy available at http://www.zdnetindia.com/swlib/messengerA2Z.exe.