Does she expect to retain any value as an "independant analyst" in the post-SCO market?
I imagine she expects a lucrative career doing similar PR work for other companies. I cannot imagine SCO is the only company out there for which this kind of service would not be greatly appreciated. Toxic sludge is good for you.
Who would value her opinion, knowing that her opinion is for sale?
People are at least in theory falling for the idea her relentless PR for the Canopy group is "independent" at the moment. Since people (such as reporters) are making no effort to check out her history as a source at the moment, I see no reason why they would suddenly begin to do so in future after the SCO case is over. DiDio is pretty much completely free from any sort of consequences for her actions, ever, and she almost certainly knows this.
It sounds like here the entire issue was not the enforceability of the EULAs, but the idea that you could be presented with this contract and not be given the ability to return it to the store. This is not a victory; this just predicts a situation where persons objecting to terms in EULAs will be universally responded to with well why don't you just take it back to the store.
A victory would be something saying that first sale rights apply to software, just like they do to books, and if you take a piece of software to the front counter of a store and purchase it you just bought a copy of that software, even if the software vendor includes a piece of paper saying that you didn't.
It's basically just a man-in-the-middle attack, where a site that isn't google poses as google and then takes the information intended for google?
Well, um, that's a pretty well-solved problem, isn't it? Just have the google search agent thingy use SSL, and refuse to let it incorporate local data unless the SSL cert checks out as Google's. Problem solved? Or am I missing something?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
If "conspiracy" can be used to illegalize the transmission of simple information then something is very very wrong with our definition of "conspiracy".
Medicines for the World's Poor. "Public-private partnerships" emerged as a force in 2004, according to Science magazine, affecting the way medicines are developed and delivered to emerging nations.
Sounds like applied science to me.
Personally though if I were Science I wouldn't give SpaceShipOne a prize this year, since getting someone into space isn't technically by itself a new development in even applied science. I'd give it to them in a year or two-- once they manage to successfully begin operating their spaceliner business, since that IS going to be a dramatic change in how science is applied...
If empire were an American desire Europe would have went through being territories all the way to US states by now.
State-based imperialism has been shown ineffective. It's unwieldy, it doesn't really offer any advantages, and it's risky; when you attempt to retain dominance in an area through military means, sometimes people fight back through military means, and it's not always possible to paint the people fighting back against an invading/occupying force as the aggressors. Plus, you can only maintain state-based imperialism if you continuously control the state that runs the empire, and in a democracy like America this runs the risk of temporary local power transfers leading to your empire being disassembled.
The important thing now is economy-based imperialism. There's no need to rule the world when you can just own it. The wave that's been building since 1950, and the wave of the future, is for empire to be economic in nature, for military force to be used only when necessary to support that economic empire, and for the states-- which are increasingly irrelevant anyway-- to be ignored except when they stand in the way of that empire's interests.
Of course, occasionally America may resort to traditional, invade-and-occupy methods of imperialism to maintain its economic empire and ensure its spheres of interest. But this is usually not necessary, and only under certain circumstances is it the appropriate tool to use. Who on earth would try to invade or occupy Europe, anyway? Twice now in the last 250 years Europe has faced a rogue superpower trying to conquer the continent through military means, and both times it repelled and squashed that superpower against staggering odds. Only a very poor businessman would accept those odds even if there were a good reason.
This means we can procrastinate further on whether to help you guys start the next arms race.
America may not be out of the gate yet but Mr. Bush's arms race is already well underway. Before too long Russia will have missiles inherently capable of penetrating any missile defense shield we can build.
The White House, of course, will probably continue to claim there was no reason to continue those ballistic-arms-buildup treaties we had with the USSR.
WTF, dude? Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing?
If it weren't for GWB, this system in its current form wouldn't exist. Therefore yes, I don't see how anyone else could be blamed for it failing.
It is not so much that GWB is blamed for this particular test failing. It is definitely that GWB is to blame for the entire current existence of this ineffective system at a time where there are many desperately more important needs for that money, and GWB is the one directly to blame due to the single-minded and careless way in which he has railroaded the program into its current point.
If Dennis Kucinch became president and spent $10 billion on Universal Meditative Anti-Terrorism Field research, we would most definitely blame him when 4 years later there was no sign it works.
Why don't you complain that NASA spent billions of dollars only to have a few rockets explode on the launch pad?
Because NASA occasionally produces worthwhile things. Disasters are a minority, not a rule, and when the hardware works it has a productive effect. When efficacy declines, as it has somewhat in the last few years, the question becomes "how can we improve the safety and reliability of the program?" and not "will the program ever do anything?"
When someone spends several times the lifetime budget of NASA on a program which has no indication of working and whose only discernible effect if it does work seems to have been to inspire Russia to believe it is in an arms race and vastly upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal, something is wrong. Spending money on research and development is only a goal as good as the research and development it produces. It is not an end unto itself.
Who signs up for hard classes in fourth year? Duh! You've practically got your degree. sit back, uncap a cold one and choose from the many many many easy courses every school offers to fourth year students.
I personally have a strong belief that I would rather take an interesting and challenging class, learn useful things, and fail, than take a boring fluff class and get an A.
....... of course one of the direct side-effects of this belief is that I am going to be finishing college a semester late and with a really poor GPA, so maybe this is not a philosophy anyone interested in having their college degree count for something in the hiring process to follow.
The september 2003 IBM paper linked above was published before the oreily.com link I gave, yes. However the oreily.com link I gave was merely third party documentation.
The "make-like" XML StartupItems system that the documentation describes, however, has been present in Mac OS X at least since the first available public beta, and the trivial improvement from there of launching nondependent system services in parallel has been present since OS X 10.2 in 2002 somewheres.
IBM has published a paper on speeding up the boot process using something like a make to launch things in parallel that are not dependent on each other.
They don't use windows to use windows. They use windows because that's where the stuff they use is. A large part of why the transition to Linux seems unpleasant is that everything changes. It isn't just changing the little logo in the start bar from an ugly shattered window to an ugly foot. They have to change every program they use. They can't use the programs they're familiar with.
Except, what programs do they use? Well, pretty much, Internet Explorer, AIM, Kazaa, and games. Maybe Mirc and Word. I'd be willing to bet most people spend 99% of their time in those six things.
Games are probably a lost battle. OpenOffice may or may not ever really be as nice as Word is or WordPerfect was. But if someone reaches the point where they find themselves using Firefox, Gaim, Bittorrent and Xchat all the time... well, then, switching to Linux doesn't seem like so much of a transition, at least superficially, does it?
This said I think when this person linked at the top talks about what is good for "Free Software", he is confusing what is good for "Free Software" with what is good for the Linux Desktop. I don't use windows so I can't particularly comment there, but as a programmer who uses OS X-- a similarly closed-source desktop-- I don't think it is wise to look at things in terms of what is good for Free Software. I would look at it as, Free Software and OS X have positive things to offer one another. If either side ignores this it is to their own detriment. Something similar can probably be said about Free Software and Windows.
Those who want the law reformed need to posit credible alternatives, alternatives that ensure that movies (and music and books etc) can still be made, before arguing that there's something inherently unjust in having to pay to have access copyrighted material.
Since those who want the law enforced have yet to demonstrate that movies, music, books, etc cannot still be made if file trading continues-- at least, not justified it by way of anything except fabricated statistics-- I don't see why this is needed.
The fact that some media sources feel PR campaigns stand in for justification for government action does not shift the burden of justification onto the hands of the targets of that government action.
Meanwhile, offering viable alternatives is unlikely to do much good. The media cartels that the MPAA and RIAA represent-- which, well, I don't know much about movies, but I can tell you the RIAA is the single biggest impediment faced by someone interested in making music today, far more so than file trading could probably ever be-- are threatened far less by people using their products without paying than they are by change. The status quo of the markets they dominate are easy to manipulate, and thus easy to continue dominating. Change that status quo-- through technology like file sharing, through changes in the law or distribution models-- and you present a threat to their continued dominance. I don't see much sign they'll really differentiate between these potential threats. You will find "credible alternatives" to the current functioning of copyright law, in the unlikely chance such proposals ever get any attention, being fought by the ??AAs just as tooth and nail as current attempts to merely circumvent copyright law have been.
While the PSP game roster is sure to grow--with dozens of titles in the works by Sony and third-party publishers--promised music and video support is less clear. As of yet, no music or movie studios, including the major ones owned by Sony, have announced plans to release content on the new Universal Media Disc (UMD) optical media format the PSP will use.
Meanwhile Sony has indicated that they will not be releasing a UMD burner, and I've heard it reported that traditional minidiscs are the wrong size for and not usable in the PSP's UMD player, so it looks like memory sticks are your only option if you want to use media on the PSP.
Just because "halo effect" is recieved from the iPod does not mean it will be recieved in the same way from the hypothetical iPod Flash. There are two problems here:
1. A selection effect. The Macintosh and the iPod both target the same group-- people who are willing to pay more for a pleasant experience with their electronics. If someone buys an iPod that means they're okay with paying a bit more for a device that might not have quite as much functionality or disk space as some of the same-price-range alternatives, due to a perception that the thing they're buying will look cooler or be nicer to use or make them happier. This means this is the ideal person to make some sort of iMac sales pitch to. If you make a cheap minimal flash player you lose this selection effect; you are now targetting the budget market, where the halo effect is less likely to be effective because these are the people more likely to just go buy eMachines or whatever it is they make these days with a minimum of fuss.
2. The reason people are convinced to buy macs from the iPod is that after using their new iPods, they basically just think, I am really enjoying my iPod. If their music players are this nice, wouldn't their computers be even better? And start looking into getting a mac. So in order for the halo effect to kick in from the iPod the person has to be really impressed by the iPod. Being really impressive, even for the lower cost, is going to be a heck of a lot harder with a device without a screen or such. So the halo effect will be much harder for Apple to attain via the iPod Flash, if it's real.
This is just speculation to get attention, as near as I can gather. "IBM and Apple should merge!" sounds neat if you don't look at any of the context, but if you look at the actual products they sell it doesn't make really much sense at all. IBM targets almost exclusively corporate customers. Apple targets almost exclusively consumer customers. There's no good way to tie these two things together at all, especially since the existing product lines of each have no particular relevance or connectivity to one another. Okay, yeah, like the article mentions, IBM doesn't have a presence in the "lifestyle"/enduser demographic. Why is this a problem? That's just not their market.
About the only obvious place the products could tie together is if IBM wanted to sell macs as corporate desktops. But as far as I'm aware when IBM sets up corporate desktops, it's just to sell their server infrastructure and such-- that is, IBM's push isn't "we'll sell you all this infrastructure stuff and give you better corporate desktop machines as well!" it's "we'll sell you this infrastructure stuff and it will work with the corporate desktop machines you were going to sell anyway!" In fact as far as I'm aware despite IBM's great use of Linux in the server space they have yet to use anything but Windows on the desktops their solutions people set up-- they're transitioning to Linux desktops internally, but haven't shown signs that they want to try to change the general corporate-desktop status quo. Given all this, it would seem from IBM's perspective suddenly springing "and you should switch to macs for your desktops!" on their customers would make things a lot harder to sell. So I don't think that Apple's systems have much relevance to IBM. Conversely, I don't see IBM selling DB2 en masse to the end-user consumer market.
Meanwhile the article's support for itself is full of nonsense, for example:
Then of course there is Darwin, Apple's version of BSD Unix at the heart of its Mac OS X operating system, which would nicely provide IBM with a non Linux semi-open source alternative, and one that is focused on its on benchmark beating P (sorry G) 5 microprocessor
Why on earth would IBM want a non Linux semi-open source alternative? First off IBM has been making lots of money out of actually just selling Linux; second off if they needed an alternative to Linux they sell several "real" UNIX derivatives themselves; third off Darwin is very highly specialized for the needs and APIs of OS X, and many of the design decisions therein don't make really a lot of sense except in OS X's context. If IBM wanted to repackage BSD they'd have done it themselves by now.
I could maybe see it making sense if IBM tried to integrate their products better with Apple's-- I.E. trying to twist things so that XServes can be dropped into a IBM infrastructure package, or trying to sell packages of G5s as modeling boxes and IBM hardware as a render farm to places doing industrial graphics work. That would be neat, and definitely wouldn't hurt the situation for either company. However I don't see there being some kind of "missing puzzle piece" either Apple or IBM could fill in by working with the other the way the article seems to imply, and the article doesn't give me good reason to think there is one.
There isn't really a "larger issue" here; spinal injuries are one of the most immediately promising applications of stem cell research, and there was an article just like a week or something ago here about curing certain spinal injuries in rats by injecting cordal stem cells.
Since stem cells are currently in the news as a directly competing potential technique for doing the exact same thing the technique in this article does, it seems mentioning them here is both reasonable and germane. If nothing else I think that saying that new experimental spinal cord research techniques are only "marginally related" to new experimental spinal cord research techniques is perhaps not quite fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't slander/libel cases a LOT easier to win in the U.K.?
Mr. McBride better be careful what he says about Linux over there...
Canopy's investment in Trolltech is absolutely tiny. As far as I am aware nothing that could possibly happen to Canopy would affect Trolltech at all.
Does she expect to retain any value as an "independant analyst" in the post-SCO market?
I imagine she expects a lucrative career doing similar PR work for other companies. I cannot imagine SCO is the only company out there for which this kind of service would not be greatly appreciated. Toxic sludge is good for you.
Who would value her opinion, knowing that her opinion is for sale?
People are at least in theory falling for the idea her relentless PR for the Canopy group is "independent" at the moment. Since people (such as reporters) are making no effort to check out her history as a source at the moment, I see no reason why they would suddenly begin to do so in future after the SCO case is over. DiDio is pretty much completely free from any sort of consequences for her actions, ever, and she almost certainly knows this.
It sounds like here the entire issue was not the enforceability of the EULAs, but the idea that you could be presented with this contract and not be given the ability to return it to the store. This is not a victory; this just predicts a situation where persons objecting to terms in EULAs will be universally responded to with well why don't you just take it back to the store.
A victory would be something saying that first sale rights apply to software, just like they do to books, and if you take a piece of software to the front counter of a store and purchase it you just bought a copy of that software, even if the software vendor includes a piece of paper saying that you didn't.
It's basically just a man-in-the-middle attack, where a site that isn't google poses as google and then takes the information intended for google?
Well, um, that's a pretty well-solved problem, isn't it? Just have the google search agent thingy use SSL, and refuse to let it incorporate local data unless the SSL cert checks out as Google's. Problem solved? Or am I missing something?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
If "conspiracy" can be used to illegalize the transmission of simple information then something is very very wrong with our definition of "conspiracy".
- Medicines for the World's Poor. "Public-private partnerships" emerged as a force in 2004, according to Science magazine, affecting the way medicines are developed and delivered to emerging nations.
Sounds like applied science to me.Personally though if I were Science I wouldn't give SpaceShipOne a prize this year, since getting someone into space isn't technically by itself a new development in even applied science. I'd give it to them in a year or two-- once they manage to successfully begin operating their spaceliner business, since that IS going to be a dramatic change in how science is applied...
If it wasn't for France, you'd be speaking with a British accent right now.
If empire were an American desire Europe would have went through being territories all the way to US states by now.
State-based imperialism has been shown ineffective. It's unwieldy, it doesn't really offer any advantages, and it's risky; when you attempt to retain dominance in an area through military means, sometimes people fight back through military means, and it's not always possible to paint the people fighting back against an invading/occupying force as the aggressors. Plus, you can only maintain state-based imperialism if you continuously control the state that runs the empire, and in a democracy like America this runs the risk of temporary local power transfers leading to your empire being disassembled.
The important thing now is economy-based imperialism. There's no need to rule the world when you can just own it. The wave that's been building since 1950, and the wave of the future, is for empire to be economic in nature, for military force to be used only when necessary to support that economic empire, and for the states-- which are increasingly irrelevant anyway-- to be ignored except when they stand in the way of that empire's interests.
Of course, occasionally America may resort to traditional, invade-and-occupy methods of imperialism to maintain its economic empire and ensure its spheres of interest. But this is usually not necessary, and only under certain circumstances is it the appropriate tool to use. Who on earth would try to invade or occupy Europe, anyway? Twice now in the last 250 years Europe has faced a rogue superpower trying to conquer the continent through military means, and both times it repelled and squashed that superpower against staggering odds. Only a very poor businessman would accept those odds even if there were a good reason.
This means we can procrastinate further on whether to help you guys start the next arms race.
America may not be out of the gate yet but Mr. Bush's arms race is already well underway. Before too long Russia will have missiles inherently capable of penetrating any missile defense shield we can build.
The White House, of course, will probably continue to claim there was no reason to continue those ballistic-arms-buildup treaties we had with the USSR.
WTF, dude? Do you seriously think that GWB has anything to do with the thing failing?
If it weren't for GWB, this system in its current form wouldn't exist. Therefore yes, I don't see how anyone else could be blamed for it failing.
It is not so much that GWB is blamed for this particular test failing. It is definitely that GWB is to blame for the entire current existence of this ineffective system at a time where there are many desperately more important needs for that money, and GWB is the one directly to blame due to the single-minded and careless way in which he has railroaded the program into its current point.
If Dennis Kucinch became president and spent $10 billion on Universal Meditative Anti-Terrorism Field research, we would most definitely blame him when 4 years later there was no sign it works.
Why don't you complain that NASA spent billions of dollars only to have a few rockets explode on the launch pad?
Because NASA occasionally produces worthwhile things. Disasters are a minority, not a rule, and when the hardware works it has a productive effect. When efficacy declines, as it has somewhat in the last few years, the question becomes "how can we improve the safety and reliability of the program?" and not "will the program ever do anything?"
When someone spends several times the lifetime budget of NASA on a program which has no indication of working and whose only discernible effect if it does work seems to have been to inspire Russia to believe it is in an arms race and vastly upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal, something is wrong. Spending money on research and development is only a goal as good as the research and development it produces. It is not an end unto itself.
Who signs up for hard classes in fourth year? Duh! You've practically got your degree. sit back, uncap a cold one and choose from the many many many easy courses every school offers to fourth year students.
I personally have a strong belief that I would rather take an interesting and challenging class, learn useful things, and fail, than take a boring fluff class and get an A.
....... of course one of the direct side-effects of this belief is that I am going to be finishing college a semester late and with a really poor GPA, so maybe this is not a philosophy anyone interested in having their college degree count for something in the hiring process to follow.
Except that the IBM paper was published first.
The september 2003 IBM paper linked above was published before the oreily.com link I gave, yes. However the oreily.com link I gave was merely third party documentation.
The "make-like" XML StartupItems system that the documentation describes, however, has been present in Mac OS X at least since the first available public beta, and the trivial improvement from there of launching nondependent system services in parallel has been present since OS X 10.2 in 2002 somewheres.
IBM has published a paper on speeding up the boot process using something like a make to launch things in parallel that are not dependent on each other.
That sounds very familiar.
They don't use windows to use windows. They use windows because that's where the stuff they use is. A large part of why the transition to Linux seems unpleasant is that everything changes. It isn't just changing the little logo in the start bar from an ugly shattered window to an ugly foot. They have to change every program they use. They can't use the programs they're familiar with.
Except, what programs do they use? Well, pretty much, Internet Explorer, AIM, Kazaa, and games. Maybe Mirc and Word. I'd be willing to bet most people spend 99% of their time in those six things.
Games are probably a lost battle. OpenOffice may or may not ever really be as nice as Word is or WordPerfect was. But if someone reaches the point where they find themselves using Firefox, Gaim, Bittorrent and Xchat all the time... well, then, switching to Linux doesn't seem like so much of a transition, at least superficially, does it?
This said I think when this person linked at the top talks about what is good for "Free Software", he is confusing what is good for "Free Software" with what is good for the Linux Desktop. I don't use windows so I can't particularly comment there, but as a programmer who uses OS X-- a similarly closed-source desktop-- I don't think it is wise to look at things in terms of what is good for Free Software. I would look at it as, Free Software and OS X have positive things to offer one another. If either side ignores this it is to their own detriment. Something similar can probably be said about Free Software and Windows.
Does DNS technically support null-string domains?
.mobi
Just wondering if they'd just let someone specific register
Those who want the law reformed need to posit credible alternatives, alternatives that ensure that movies (and music and books etc) can still be made, before arguing that there's something inherently unjust in having to pay to have access copyrighted material.
Since those who want the law enforced have yet to demonstrate that movies, music, books, etc cannot still be made if file trading continues-- at least, not justified it by way of anything except fabricated statistics-- I don't see why this is needed.
The fact that some media sources feel PR campaigns stand in for justification for government action does not shift the burden of justification onto the hands of the targets of that government action.
Meanwhile, offering viable alternatives is unlikely to do much good. The media cartels that the MPAA and RIAA represent-- which, well, I don't know much about movies, but I can tell you the RIAA is the single biggest impediment faced by someone interested in making music today, far more so than file trading could probably ever be-- are threatened far less by people using their products without paying than they are by change. The status quo of the markets they dominate are easy to manipulate, and thus easy to continue dominating. Change that status quo-- through technology like file sharing, through changes in the law or distribution models-- and you present a threat to their continued dominance. I don't see much sign they'll really differentiate between these potential threats. You will find "credible alternatives" to the current functioning of copyright law, in the unlikely chance such proposals ever get any attention, being fought by the ??AAs just as tooth and nail as current attempts to merely circumvent copyright law have been.
You're honestly trying to argue video conferencing chat originated with Microsoft?
That being said though, I wonder what Armored Core PSP is going to be like...
It's going to be Not an FPS, interestingly.
although Sony still claims to lose $250US on each unit (eep).
Do you have a source for this?
Actually it looks like UMD is a no show so far:Meanwhile Sony has indicated that they will not be releasing a UMD burner, and I've heard it reported that traditional minidiscs are the wrong size for and not usable in the PSP's UMD player, so it looks like memory sticks are your only option if you want to use media on the PSP.
Except, of course, for all of those x86 based machines in their server line.
Just because "halo effect" is recieved from the iPod does not mean it will be recieved in the same way from the hypothetical iPod Flash. There are two problems here:
1. A selection effect. The Macintosh and the iPod both target the same group-- people who are willing to pay more for a pleasant experience with their electronics. If someone buys an iPod that means they're okay with paying a bit more for a device that might not have quite as much functionality or disk space as some of the same-price-range alternatives, due to a perception that the thing they're buying will look cooler or be nicer to use or make them happier. This means this is the ideal person to make some sort of iMac sales pitch to. If you make a cheap minimal flash player you lose this selection effect; you are now targetting the budget market, where the halo effect is less likely to be effective because these are the people more likely to just go buy eMachines or whatever it is they make these days with a minimum of fuss.
2. The reason people are convinced to buy macs from the iPod is that after using their new iPods, they basically just think, I am really enjoying my iPod. If their music players are this nice, wouldn't their computers be even better? And start looking into getting a mac. So in order for the halo effect to kick in from the iPod the person has to be really impressed by the iPod. Being really impressive, even for the lower cost, is going to be a heck of a lot harder with a device without a screen or such. So the halo effect will be much harder for Apple to attain via the iPod Flash, if it's real.
This is just speculation to get attention, as near as I can gather. "IBM and Apple should merge!" sounds neat if you don't look at any of the context, but if you look at the actual products they sell it doesn't make really much sense at all. IBM targets almost exclusively corporate customers. Apple targets almost exclusively consumer customers. There's no good way to tie these two things together at all, especially since the existing product lines of each have no particular relevance or connectivity to one another. Okay, yeah, like the article mentions, IBM doesn't have a presence in the "lifestyle"/enduser demographic. Why is this a problem? That's just not their market.
About the only obvious place the products could tie together is if IBM wanted to sell macs as corporate desktops. But as far as I'm aware when IBM sets up corporate desktops, it's just to sell their server infrastructure and such-- that is, IBM's push isn't "we'll sell you all this infrastructure stuff and give you better corporate desktop machines as well!" it's "we'll sell you this infrastructure stuff and it will work with the corporate desktop machines you were going to sell anyway!" In fact as far as I'm aware despite IBM's great use of Linux in the server space they have yet to use anything but Windows on the desktops their solutions people set up-- they're transitioning to Linux desktops internally, but haven't shown signs that they want to try to change the general corporate-desktop status quo. Given all this, it would seem from IBM's perspective suddenly springing "and you should switch to macs for your desktops!" on their customers would make things a lot harder to sell. So I don't think that Apple's systems have much relevance to IBM. Conversely, I don't see IBM selling DB2 en masse to the end-user consumer market.
Meanwhile the article's support for itself is full of nonsense, for example:
Then of course there is Darwin, Apple's version of BSD Unix at the heart of its Mac OS X operating system, which would nicely provide IBM with a non Linux semi-open source alternative, and one that is focused on its on benchmark beating P (sorry G) 5 microprocessor
Why on earth would IBM want a non Linux semi-open source alternative? First off IBM has been making lots of money out of actually just selling Linux; second off if they needed an alternative to Linux they sell several "real" UNIX derivatives themselves; third off Darwin is very highly specialized for the needs and APIs of OS X, and many of the design decisions therein don't make really a lot of sense except in OS X's context. If IBM wanted to repackage BSD they'd have done it themselves by now.
I could maybe see it making sense if IBM tried to integrate their products better with Apple's-- I.E. trying to twist things so that XServes can be dropped into a IBM infrastructure package, or trying to sell packages of G5s as modeling boxes and IBM hardware as a render farm to places doing industrial graphics work. That would be neat, and definitely wouldn't hurt the situation for either company. However I don't see there being some kind of "missing puzzle piece" either Apple or IBM could fill in by working with the other the way the article seems to imply, and the article doesn't give me good reason to think there is one.
There isn't really a "larger issue" here; spinal injuries are one of the most immediately promising applications of stem cell research, and there was an article just like a week or something ago here about curing certain spinal injuries in rats by injecting cordal stem cells.
Since stem cells are currently in the news as a directly competing potential technique for doing the exact same thing the technique in this article does, it seems mentioning them here is both reasonable and germane. If nothing else I think that saying that new experimental spinal cord research techniques are only "marginally related" to new experimental spinal cord research techniques is perhaps not quite fair.