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Slashback: Sidekick Justice, Free WebTV, Office Patent
Justice for stolen Sidekick victim. chroma writes "Remember the stolen Sidekick from a few days back? When the girl uploaded photos of herself to T-Mobile's service and bragged on IM about having the stolen PDA? Well, after creating a webpage that gathered 400,000 links in less than two weeks, and much runaround from the NYPD, justice has finally been served: the perpetrator has been arrested and the PDA returned. Further information is also available from The New York Times."
Free WebTV test a hit. An anonymous reader writes "Disney has said that their recent ABC free WebTV was a real hit with viewers and advertisers alike. Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.'"
SUSE 10.1 release postponed. An anonymous reader writes "According to a confidential memo, the next release of both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will be delayed. The delay is apparently to allow Novell 'to address final issues with our new package management, registration, and update system and also fix the remaining blocker defects.' From the article: 'SUSE has a new update and package management system, which has not worked well in its initial release in the free, community OpenSUSE 10.1 release. Unfortunately, even after a recent set of fixes was released, SUSE's update and new program installation system is still giving many users trouble.'"
Microsoft loses Office patent appeal. xwipeoutx writes to tell us ITNews.com is reporting that Microsoft has lost their appeal in US Federal court over a judgement handed down saying they violated a patent by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. The original judgement stipulated that Micosoft was to pay Amado $6.1 million for violating a patent covering a means to link spreadsheets and databases.
Paypal fixes their phishing hole. Juha-Matti Laurio writes "News.com is providing new information to the previous PayPal XSS hole and reporting that the hole is now fixed." From the article: "By exploiting the flaw, attackers were able to redirect people from a PayPal Web page to an online trap located in South Korea, a representative for the service said. The page actually has a real PayPal URL, but hosts malicious code that presents a message warning members that their account had been compromised. It then redirects them to a 'phishing' Web site."
Finally, Batman gets what's coming to him.
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This doesn't surprise me one bit. I find that when I have a computer with me while I'm watching TV, I'm much more likely to visit an advertiser's page. I find myself poking at the product pages for products that I'd never buy, like the Toyota Yaris or internet services that compete with my own. This leads me to believe that, if TiVo really wants to fill the gap caused by ad-skipping, they should create interactive ads that viewers can poke and prod.
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Our trusty sidekick will recover your trusty Sidekick!
This is an honest question, I'm not trying to be a troll here but seriously... Is SUSE really relevant anymore? I mean this may be a case of I don't use it so no one must but I don't know anyone who is using it, or has even tried it. What is its "killer app"?
Suse's Killer App is YaST. In my experience, Yast is by far the simplest, most intuitive system configuration tool of any linux distro. I myself use gentoo these days, but SuSe was my first linux distro, and will always hold a soft spot in my heart. If you want a simple linux, then SuSe is probably the closest you'll get. They also ship with a large assortment of wireless drivers, making it very simple to configure your wireless card.
ABC's use of the web to stream their most popular shows online worked out well because it was done well. It offers what it promises -- the latest shows, soon after they air, with minimally intrusive advertising. I found myself watching shows that I had missed and forgotten to tape, shows while I was staying late at work waiting for stuff to finish up, or shows that I wanted to rewatch parts of (remember the accidental boob-grope of evangeline lilly in the last episode of lost...that was wierd). I would not go there exclusively because 1) The quality is better on TV, or even better, on HDTV and 2) The website design is still a bit sluggish. I think there is plenty of room for improvement, but it appears atleast one network is on the right track.
In 2005, Microsoft was told to pay Amado $US6.1 million for violating Amado's patent, which covered technology to link spreadsheets and databases.
You mean they just thought of that last year?
It was the first time that Microsoft had updated its software for purely legal reasons.
It may have been the first time Microsoft had to update the software for legal reasons, but lest we forget the antitrust case. The settlement of United States v Microsoft did not require Microsoft to change any of its code, although Microsoft did have to make its own concessions. The article makes it seem like it's Microsoft's first run-in with the courts.
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Concerning the Sidekick saga, how is it Digg got a shout out in the New York Slimes and ./ didn't?
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
We use it, but we're not a terrific data point. We haven't moved to 10 yet at all. But here are some basics:
I'm an Apple fan, and in my opinion SuSE is the Apple of Linux. (Of course, Apple is itself the Apple of *nix-like OSes.) They are not the earliest adopters of new technology, but they do a good job of integrating it. But moreover they make it easy to use and administer.*
Big business wants a Vendor, not a community. In the giant world that's pretty much RH and SuSE, or IBM selling someone else's.
Novell also makes a good business selling networking solutions for you whole office, not making you put them together youself.
SuSE will happily ship with the best available drivers and software, even if those are proprietary. For some people this is a reason not to use SuSE - zealots have their place, and I would not want the strictly OSS distros to go away - but if you are more interested in Linux-as-a-current-tool than Linux-as-a-political-statement to force vendors to open drivers, this is the right choice philosophy for you.
*Let me define "easy to use and administer" more: YaST puts a nice front end on whatever you're doing (package management and basically all other system administration) - with enough power to configure whatever you want however you want and enough guidance that you can do it even if it's not your speciality and you've been awake too long. It's the perfect kind of system that LETS you be knowledgeable but does not REQUIRE you to be knowledgeable. You can seamlessly escalate simple point and click management to advanced point and click management to tweaking files by hand that it then won't screw up.
So to me, "easy to use" means that I can use, in each instance, a system that is as automatic or as manual as I want, based on how much expertise I have in that area, and how much time and attention I have for the issue "right now"
Configuration entirely by manually touching files/registries/whatever is a little like walking through a minefield... get too tired, make a typo and all sorts of stuff might explode, and you've making a large number of changes. But I'd take it any day over a Windows GUI-only system where IF it explodes and, say, doesn't boot you have a much harder time putting it back together than you do with a text editor. But YaST is the ideal hybrid - it reduces your chances of stupid mistakes without limiting your power. You edit what you want, let YaST edit what you don't. It's not by far the only piece of software to do this, but I think it's a good example.
( I think much of OS X is similar. Can you enter complex firewall and packet forwarding configurations in their little GUI? No. Does their GUI work for most people? Yep. Does their GUI still use the standard BSD firewall, which you can configure however you want? Yep. )
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Why? It's his property. He has every right to get back because it's his!!!!!!!! Not yours. You have no right to charge anyone money because YOU GOT RIPPED OFF.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Our decesion to go with Suse has nothing to do with the quality or killer app of the OS. It's ok, nothing super special. However, we are a mostly netware shop. We got all our Suse licenses for free including support and didn't have to pay a penny more. I'm guessing other Novell shops are in a similiar situtation. This was REALLY smart of them, otherwise we'd probably have just gone with Debian. But it was just as expensive to go with Suse (free) and at least this way we get support on the off chance we need it. Also, a lot of propierty vendors support Suse and Redhat. Last, OES seems to just run on a regular SLES 9 install. Once we lose our Netware boxes to OES it will be nice just to have Suse Linux across the board (meaning consisant internal adminitration documentation for things like network configuration, printing, and other things that are the same for every server).
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
The online update support for SuSE 10.1 is horrible compared to past versions. It is *extremely* slow. Adding a new repository took well over 30 minutes to process it, the CPU remaining busy the entire time. Granted, the machine is only a 1.5GHz P4, but it should take nowhere near this amount of time.
Bringing up the software install tool takes 150MB of RAM. This is excessive.
Then OpenSuse keeps moving repositories around, or deleting them. They removed the KDE 3.5.3 repository recently, for example.
I'm almost ready to switch to another distribution, maybe Kubuntu or some other up-to-date KDE based distro.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
This bad publicity is really going to cut into my business of selling Sidekicks off of subway platforms! ;-) *JK*
~
Actually, here's another recent story. My girlfriend, who works as a cashier at a local Dollar General, just got interviewed by the police and FBI for selling 25 cellphones to some customer. I assume they were Tracphones or such pay as you go things.
The question is, why would they be interested in such things. Maybe he needs them as a contractor for his business, maybe he resells them to imigrants who can't speak English (and he can, say for example, speak spanish), maybe they were at a great deal and he's going to resell them elsewhere. Since when is it illegal to buy cell phones?
I told her not to tell them anything. For one, its none of their business. For two, Dollar General hired her to ring up merchandice they sold and that's what she did, her job. There is no policy about how many of anything to sell to anybody, or anything singling out cell phones. She said they were all sweet and so and called her sweetheart and sweetie... I told her the only person that has any business doing that is me, her boyfriend, and that they are two faced scumbags looking for anything to prosecute her who has nothing to do with anything, just is just a cashier like a dozen others there.
I think Paul Verhoeven and JMS both have to give propers to David Cronenburg, who came up with the idea of very interactive TV in the '80s with Videodrome.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
let's not forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_O'Donnell,_Jr Kevin O'Donnel, who wrote ORA:KEL ( Berkley Books, August, 1984). A lot of likeminded ideas arose in that era *sigh*.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
If you want to read the Sidekick story without having to log in at the NY Times, the same reporter (Nicholas Confessore) has written another article, delivered up by the good folks over at the International Herald Tribune.
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Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
Except for the fact that a rectangular piece of plastic has little or no intrinsic value, as evidenced by your suggestion to use it as a ice scraper, a coaster, or a shim. A mobile phone _does_ have intrinsic value which is made obvious by the fact that later the mother claimed that she bought it ($50 worth of intrinsic value) from a shady subway merchant. (There have been many stories as to how the sidekick wound up in the possession of the girl, none of which I can believe because they are so wildly divergent from each other)
On a side note, I think this "disposable mentality" that one would simply dispose of a valuable electronic device because it requires the least amount of effort is quite a sad statement about both a man's respect for other men (and their possessions), and man's respect for the environment.
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