Having in mind what the demand curve for a software-based unlocking solution for the iPhone is, especially in Europe, these guys can easily charge more than 100 USD for the hack... at least until somebody else puts a competitive hack on the market.
SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company is open to talking to other Linux distributors about reaching mutual patent coverage deals similar to the agreement signed Nov. 2 with Novell. Such talks would be a good idea, Ballmer suggested, since now only Novell's SUSE Linux customers are the only Linux vendors that have any assurance that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement.
Ballmer and Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian spoke to eWEEK about the implications of their joint announcement here. The two companies have entered into a broad collaboration agreement aimed at providing greater interoperability between Windows and Linux while eliminating concerns about potential patent violations.
Click here to read Darryl Taft's story on what the Novell-Microsoft patent deal means for the software developer community. The two companies agreed to assemble a joint research facility to work on virtualization technology for Windows and Linux as well as developing greater compatibility between the Microsoft-backed Open XML and the open-source community's OpenDocument formats. They also agreed to work on Web service technology to manage physical and virtual servers in mixed Windows-Linux environments. The distributors of other versions of Linux cannot assure their customers that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement. "If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd say the answer is yes," Ballmer said. "I suspect that [customers] will take that issue up with their distributor," Ballmer said. Or if customers are considering doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version, "they'll think twice about that," he said.
However, Ballmer did not say whether Microsoft had any plans to file patent infringement suits against other Linux distributors. Competing Linux vendors "are certainly welcome to get involved to quickly provide these covenants not to sue," he said. These vendors have other incentives besides pressure from their customers and the worry about legal action, Ballmer noted. The collaboration agreement demonstrates there are other factors "in which our technical cooperation is a definite advantage to Novell," Ballmer said. The other Linux distributors, Ballmer suspects, will review their own position in the light of the Microsoft-Novell agreement. "There are a lot of Linux distributors now. All of the sudden you have got Oracle in the game; you've got Red Hat in the game." They all "will have to face the issues and help their customers" in the same way that Novell is, Ballmer said. The two companies haven't set any timetables for the delivery of Windows and Linux collaboration technologies. Planning is in the very early stages, Hovsepian said, considering that the two companies formally signed the collaboration agreement literally minutes before they walked to the press conference podium at the JW Marriott Hotel here. "We'll roll out the schedules appropriately to the public as we get them finalized," Hovsepian said.
Is the Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement good for Linux? Read Steven Vaughan-Nichols' column. Robert Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for servers and tools, and Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell's executive vice president and chief technology officer, will be working out the collaboration team's priorities and development plans, said Hovsepian. The two companies are looking for a research laboratory location that will be equidistant to both companies' headquarters, Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., and Novell in Provo, Utah, said Justin Steinman, Novell's product marketing director for Linux. One of the key goals of the collaboration effort is to build file fo
I just read the last Fortune magazine and there is an interesting interview with Dell's Chairman Michael Dell and CEO Kevin Rollins.
My favourite part: "If you ask, 'Okay, is Dell in the penalty box?' Yeah, Dell's in the penalty box," is how Michael Dell puts it. "Then we'll use this opportunity to fix everything."
Of course this was before this announcement of the investigation into Dell's finances.
I can't say if Apple's Customer Service is better than others but at least here in France I haven't had any major problems, especially if you take the Apple Care plan that costs a little extra. They certainly try really hard on the phone to be polite and helpful. Except for on time when I called during the night (their Customer Service is 24/24h,7days) and obviously there was no native French speakers left in the Call center. The woman who took the call spoke in French that was not so great, to the point that she insisted the number 3 which was part of the serial number, was not 'trois' as in French but 'drei' as in German.
What I managed to do with Apple's Customer Service recently :
1. I recently bought an iBook and only 2 weeks later a new model came out. I called the Apple Store where I bought the iBook, and they agreed to ship me the new model in exchange of the old one. All done by UPS on their charge. The only hassle was that they had to reimburse me for the old one and I had to order the new one again which was fine because the new model was cheaper.
2. My Airport Express access point died on me several months after the warranty. Apple replaced it with a new one, no questions asked.
My advice, if you're into Apple hardware, buy from the Apple Store and at least for laptops make sure you take the extended 3 year warranty - the Apple Care Plan.
Did you notice that Microsoft is on a linear growth "curve" no doubt due to OS sales. iTunes is growing faster though, so if this trend continues, in a year or two, iTunes will be the No 1 media player on the market. Not bad at all. God bless those iPods:)
Reminds me of Netscape when they launched version 4 and announced that Windows will become irrelevant as people will spend most of their time in Netscape. Is it possible that iTunes will do that in the near future as people will increasingly use their computers for entertainment (and not TV, radio, DVDs, outdoor activities, etc.)?
If you go to Apple's website now, on the home page you'll see ads for the NEW Power Mac G5, the NEW iMac G5 and the NEW PowerBooks. I think that Apple is advertising these as NEW so that people buy them NOW. Apple certainly doesn't want to mislead and encourage clients into buying something to be obsolete with an announcement at MacWorld and be left with this awful feeling of being stupid and helpless.
The only Apple hardware not advertised as new on Apple's site is the Mac Minis and the iBooks. It is obvious to me that these will be the creatures to be given a new X86 heart...
Am I the only one to think that this will be a nightmare for people in the support industry. I'm already having a headache with 7 different editions of Windows 2003 Server and what limitations each one has. Now 7 desktop editions. Obviously they like the number 7.
Can't they just do like Apple and have 1 Client and 1 Server edition of the OS. Even RedHat has only 3 server editions and 1 desktop edition.
Nooo, MSFT has decided to milk us all the way with a product segmentation strategy. Well, I guess that they need all the money they can get with their revenues being stagnant in the past several years.
The Telegraph is the highest selling British "broadsheet" newspaper, with an average daily circulation of 920,000.
In comparison the Sun sells about 3,200,000 copies daily which is quite impressive and I think makes it the biggest selling newspaper in Europe. It is a "tabloid" newspaper owned by News Corporation. Page three girls have their tops off every day, hence the name:)
For those of you who don't know, Gibson is largely accepted as the creator of the term we are familiar with nowadays - Cyberspace and a completely new sub-genre in Science Fiction. It is funny how in his book Neuromancer (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award) he presented the idea of a global information network and called it "the Matrix" in 1984.
I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.
Too bad for the record industry if what he says comes true in the near future: "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it - yet."
For the curious - Gibson is regarded as one of the experts in the field of technology and its effects on human life. Most of his books are quite dark and I think he has quite a pessimistic opinion on the future of men and technology.
In an interview, to the question of what is cyberspace, Gibson replied: "Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the Second World War we've increasingly done so many things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it's actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it's all direct electronic transfer. It's where the stock market actually takes place, it doesn't occur so much any more on the floor of the exchange but in the electronic communication between the worlds stock-exchanges. So I think that since so much of what we do is happening digitally and electrically, it's useful to have an expression that allows that all to be part of the territory. I think it makes it easier to visualize what we're doing with this stuff.
Gibson was also asked the question: "Some Americans claim that the Europeans are more afraid of the kind of society that you describe in your books..." To which he answered: "I think that the sort of societies I am describing would be more disturbing to someone who lived in a cohesive, functioning social democracy than it would be to someone who lives in the United States"
Interviewed for "Raport", Sweden's largest TV-news program. Interview done by Dan Josefsson, November 23, 1994.
I'm not surprised at all that Intel has such practices with its customers.
Two years ago, in the company I worked for, we needed to buy 600 cheap servers from Dell for an embedded application that we had to install at our clients. The price was really very important. If we couldn't get them at the right price, our project was not going to make it.
Dell did everything to lower the price. I remember they went down as much as 50% but it was still not enough.
We were about to cut the project when Dell called us and told us that the only way to reduce the price of the 600 servers further was if we signed some sort of paper saying that we used AMD processors in our previous project and this was a replacement project. This way they could get a big rebate from Intel under a certain program provided by Intel.
I just couldn't believe that Intel was ready to go that far...
If that's not a coincidence - I just finished a benchmark comparison of SATA vs. SCSI in 2 Dell server configurations to be used uses as mail servers.
I am quite satisfied by the SATA performance but I had trouble with the linux drivers. I'm very surprised that this study didn't even mention the Adaptec SATA Raid controllers, which are also used by Dell in some of their cheaper configurations.
I found that in terms of performance the 2 controllers were very close.
Depending on your needs, any of these configurations might be suitable. If you need to have more capacity for the same price you should definitely opt for the SATA Raid setup. If you do not need that much capacity and you want to be absolutely sure in the stability and reliability of your system, go for the SCSI Raid setup, which is based on mature technology with no surprises.
It seems that AMD has already paid Integraph for the clipper patents and according to the description of the case AMD vs. Integraph (January 15, 2004), AMD has settled and obtained a "resolution of all patent litigation between Intergraph and AMD and its customers."
I think that Intel should have done the same for its customers but who knows, it is possible that the situation between them is much more complex.
On April 12, 2004, AMD agreed to settle its DJ action against Intergraph and to take a license to Intergraph's Clipper patents. Under the terms of this license, AMD paid Intergraph $10 million and will make additional cash payments equal to 2% of the AMD Computation Product Group's pre-tax operating profits, if any, for the 2005 through 2007 calendar years, subject to a limit of $5 million per year. The settlement provides a license to AMD and its customers for Intergraph's Clipper family of patents and provides for the resolution of all patent litigation between Intergraph and AMD and its customers.
There is a very interesting article in the last edition of Fortune.
I think AMD got it right this time around.
My favorite quote: AMD CFO Rivet explains "As hard as we tried to win the hearts and minds of CIOs, with the desktop as our focus we were going to fail. They made their decisions with the server on down. When Intel had 100% of the x86 server market, it could charge whatever it wanted and use that money to beat us on desktops. We had to be in the profit haven".
Ruiz (CEO of AMD) calls the server-led approach "do or die" for AMD: "If we hadn't pulled this off I would have shut the door"
Hidden 512 byte initial startup ROM in MCPX
Microsoft hide startup code in the MCPX which tries to see if the BIOS is approved by Microsoft before allowing it to run - MICROSOFT ONLY
Cryptographic signatures in the BIOS
Microsoft attempt to use very strong cryptography to only allow a BIOS approved by Microsoft to run - MICROSOFT ONLY
System Monitoring Device Crypto challenge
Unless the BIOS responds soon after startup with a cryptographic sequence to the SMC, it will be reset - MICROSOFT ONLY
RSA Encrypted hashes on Applications
Ridiculously strong crypto on the applications (2048 bit RSA, double the keylength many banks use) means that only Microsoft programs can be run - MICROSOFT ONLY
A lot of students that come to visit Paris don't have the money for a good restaurant. It's quite expensive to be e a tourist in Paris. Also, contrary to what you might expect, McDonald's France is the most profitable McDonald's in Europe. The French head of McDonalds is believed to become the CEO of the European if not the World operations after the chairman and chief executive officer of McDonald's, Jim Cantalupo, recently died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 60.
All the McDonald's restaurants in France offer free Wi-Fi access. There are about 100 of those in Paris alone. I know a lot of foreign correspondents use them just to send their article. This is in case they are far from their hotel. Most of the hotels have Wi-Fi, as one might expect.
Actually in Paris the parking machines don't accept coins anymore. You have to buy a special card that you can refill. There were too many broken machines by the Romanian mafia.
It seems that every other day there is a big article or TV show that reveals how advanced Estonia is in every hi-tech domain. Let's just not forget that Estonia is a really tiny country with a population slightly over 1 million people. It is very easy to introduce such initiatives on such a small scale. Most of Paris has free Wi-Fi now offered by the Paris municipality, and this in terms of population is bigger than Estonia. I don't see anyone bragging about it. The other day they showed on TV how advanced Estonia is. You can pay your parking lot or buy flowers by SMS. Wow, that's really advanced and even if it so, I don't see how practical it can be. Come on, lose 2 minutes to type and SMS instead of paying by cash or credit card....
Don't forget CommuniGate Pro which runs on Linux too (+ 25 other OSs)
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/default.ht ml
It can be used instead of Exchange. I won't be lying if I say it's the Ferrari of all e-mail servers. The additional MAPI license you have to pay for gaining Exchange functionallity is a bit steep though.
MAPI Groupware License Number of concurrent users Price Small Office
25 users US$1,199.00 edu Professional
50 users US$1,999.00 edu Departmental
100 users US$3,499.00 edu Corporate
400 users US$9,999.00 edu Enterprise
1000 users US$19,999.00 edu ASP
>5000 users US$CALL edu
We use Stalker's excellent Communigate Pro as our corporate e-mail server and in a recent version they added support for Microsoft's SPA.
It is true that SPA is a pure Microsoft authentication protocol used for avoiding to send the password in the clear. I think the specs are not published. The only e-mail server that officially supports it is Microsoft Exchange and on the client side you have Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express on the Windows side and Outlook Express and Entourage on the Mac side...
Of course we also use 128bit SSL so the need for SPA is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Having in mind what the demand curve for a software-based unlocking solution for the iPhone is, especially in Europe, these guys can easily charge more than 100 USD for the hack... at least until somebody else puts a competitive hack on the market.
I hate that Apple announces the same kind of delays Microsoft had with Vista.
I hope the iPhone is really worth it.
Maybe next time they can hire/train more developers; Apple sure can afford them financially.
Let's Hear it from the Horses' Mouth, aaaa, Ballmer himself!
:
This is just in
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2050848,00.as p?kc=EWEWEMNL103006EP17A
SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company is open to talking to other Linux distributors about reaching mutual patent coverage deals similar to the agreement signed Nov. 2 with Novell.
Such talks would be a good idea, Ballmer suggested, since now only Novell's SUSE Linux customers are the only Linux vendors that have any assurance that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement.
Ballmer and Novell CEO Ronald Hovsepian spoke to eWEEK about the implications of their joint announcement here. The two companies have entered into a broad collaboration agreement aimed at providing greater interoperability between Windows and Linux while eliminating concerns about potential patent violations.
Click here to read Darryl Taft's story on what the Novell-Microsoft patent deal means for the software developer community.
The two companies agreed to assemble a joint research facility to work on virtualization technology for Windows and Linux as well as developing greater compatibility between the Microsoft-backed Open XML and the open-source community's OpenDocument formats. They also agreed to work on Web service technology to manage physical and virtual servers in mixed Windows-Linux environments.
The distributors of other versions of Linux cannot assure their customers that Microsoft won't sue for patent infringement. "If a customer says, 'Look, do we have liability for the use of your patented work?' Essentially, If you're using non-SUSE Linux, then I'd say the answer is yes," Ballmer said.
"I suspect that [customers] will take that issue up with their distributor," Ballmer said. Or if customers are considering doing a direct download of a non-SUSE Linux version, "they'll think twice about that," he said.
However, Ballmer did not say whether Microsoft had any plans to file patent infringement suits against other Linux distributors.
Competing Linux vendors "are certainly welcome to get involved to quickly provide these covenants not to sue," he said. These vendors have other incentives besides pressure from their customers and the worry about legal action, Ballmer noted.
The collaboration agreement demonstrates there are other factors "in which our technical cooperation is a definite advantage to Novell," Ballmer said.
The other Linux distributors, Ballmer suspects, will review their own position in the light of the Microsoft-Novell agreement. "There are a lot of Linux distributors now. All of the sudden you have got Oracle in the game; you've got Red Hat in the game."
They all "will have to face the issues and help their customers" in the same way that Novell is, Ballmer said.
The two companies haven't set any timetables for the delivery of Windows and Linux collaboration technologies. Planning is in the very early stages, Hovsepian said, considering that the two companies formally signed the collaboration agreement literally minutes before they walked to the press conference podium at the JW Marriott Hotel here. "We'll roll out the schedules appropriately to the public as we get them finalized," Hovsepian said.
Is the Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement good for Linux? Read Steven Vaughan-Nichols' column.
Robert Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for servers and tools, and Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell's executive vice president and chief technology officer, will be working out the collaboration team's priorities and development plans, said Hovsepian.
The two companies are looking for a research laboratory location that will be equidistant to both companies' headquarters, Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., and Novell in Provo, Utah, said Justin Steinman, Novell's product marketing director for Linux.
One of the key goals of the collaboration effort is to build file fo
The Market Capitalization of Intel is 120 Billion, not 39 Billion as stated by this slashdot post.
I just read the last Fortune magazine and there is an interesting interview with Dell's Chairman Michael Dell and CEO Kevin Rollins.
/ dell_intv.fortune/index.htm
c hive/2006/09/18/8386121/index.htm
My favourite part:
"If you ask, 'Okay, is Dell in the penalty box?' Yeah, Dell's in the penalty box," is how Michael Dell puts it. "Then we'll use this opportunity to fix everything."
Of course this was before this announcement of the investigation into Dell's finances.
You can read part of the interview here:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/04/magazines/fortune
The summary of the Fortune article:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_ar
I can't say if Apple's Customer Service is better than others but at least here in France I haven't had any major problems, especially if you take the Apple Care plan that costs a little extra.
They certainly try really hard on the phone to be polite and helpful.
Except for on time when I called during the night (their Customer Service is 24/24h,7days) and obviously there was no native French speakers left in the Call center. The woman who took the call spoke in French that was not so great, to the point that she insisted the number 3 which was part of the serial number, was not 'trois' as in French but 'drei' as in German.
What I managed to do with Apple's Customer Service recently :
1.
I recently bought an iBook and only 2 weeks later a new model came out.
I called the Apple Store where I bought the iBook, and they agreed to ship me the new model in exchange of the old one. All done by UPS on their charge.
The only hassle was that they had to reimburse me for the old one and I had to order the new one again which was fine because the new model was cheaper.
2.
My Airport Express access point died on me several months after the warranty. Apple replaced it with a new one, no questions asked.
My advice, if you're into Apple hardware, buy from the Apple Store and at least for laptops make sure you take the extended 3 year warranty - the Apple Care Plan.
Did you notice that Microsoft is on a linear growth "curve" no doubt due to OS sales. :)
iTunes is growing faster though, so if this trend continues, in a year or two, iTunes will be the No 1 media player on the market. Not bad at all. God bless those iPods
Reminds me of Netscape when they launched version 4 and announced that Windows will become irrelevant as people will spend most of their time in Netscape. Is it possible that iTunes will do that in the near future as people will increasingly use their computers for entertainment (and not TV, radio, DVDs, outdoor activities, etc.)?
If you go to Apple's website now, on the home page you'll see ads for the NEW Power Mac G5, the NEW iMac G5 and the NEW PowerBooks.
I think that Apple is advertising these as NEW so that people buy them NOW. Apple certainly doesn't want to mislead and encourage clients into buying something to be obsolete with an announcement at MacWorld and be left with this awful feeling of being stupid and helpless.
The only Apple hardware not advertised as new on Apple's site is the Mac Minis and the iBooks.
It is obvious to me that these will be the creatures to be given a new X86 heart...
Am I the only one to think that this will be a nightmare for people in the support industry.
I'm already having a headache with 7 different editions of Windows 2003 Server and what limitations each one has. Now 7 desktop editions. Obviously they like the number 7.
Can't they just do like Apple and have 1 Client and 1 Server edition of the OS. Even RedHat has only 3 server editions and 1 desktop edition.
Nooo, MSFT has decided to milk us all the way with a product segmentation strategy. Well, I guess that they need all the money they can get with their revenues being stagnant in the past several years.
UK's biggest selling daily newspaper is the Sun.
:)
The Telegraph is the highest selling British "broadsheet" newspaper, with an average daily circulation of 920,000.
In comparison the Sun sells about 3,200,000 copies daily which is quite impressive and I think makes it the biggest selling newspaper in Europe. It is a "tabloid" newspaper owned by News Corporation.
Page three girls have their tops off every day, hence the name
For those of you who don't know, Gibson is largely accepted as the creator of the term we are familiar with nowadays - Cyberspace and a completely new sub-genre in Science Fiction.
It is funny how in his book Neuromancer (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award) he presented the idea of a global information network and called it "the Matrix" in 1984.
I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.
Too bad for the record industry if what he says comes true in the near future: "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.
Though not all of us know it - yet."
For the curious - Gibson is regarded as one of the experts in the field of technology and its effects on human life. Most of his books are quite dark and I think he has quite a pessimistic opinion on the future of men and technology.
In an interview, to the question of what is cyberspace, Gibson replied: "Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the Second World War we've increasingly done so many things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it's actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it's all direct electronic transfer. It's where the stock market actually takes place, it doesn't occur so much any more on the floor of the exchange but in the electronic communication between the worlds stock-exchanges.
So I think that since so much of what we do is happening digitally and electrically, it's useful to have an expression that allows that all to be part of the territory. I think it makes it easier to visualize what we're doing with this stuff.
Gibson was also asked the question:
"Some Americans claim that the Europeans are more afraid of the kind of society that you describe in your books..."
To which he answered:
"I think that the sort of societies I am describing would be more disturbing to someone who lived in a cohesive, functioning social democracy than it would be to someone who lives in the United States"
Interviewed for "Raport", Sweden's largest TV-news program. Interview done by Dan Josefsson, November 23, 1994.
Well, since the only source quoted for the story by Slashdot is CNET, I wouild like to remind you that Intel is an investor in CNET.
No comment.
I appreciate your evaluation of my post and the explanation of what should be considered as "news worthy".
But may be in my post I just put more weight on NEW in "news worthy", as in "Google hasn't presented anything NEW here".
What's exactly the news here?
Yahoo's been doing this for years.
Ah, I forgot, it's Google. Anything as much as a difference in the atmospheric pressure around the Google campus makes the front page on slashdot.
I'm not surprised at all that Intel has such practices with its customers.
Two years ago, in the company I worked for, we needed to buy 600 cheap servers from Dell for an embedded application that we had to install at our clients. The price was really very important. If we couldn't get them at the right price, our project was not going to make it.
Dell did everything to lower the price. I remember they went down as much as 50% but it was still not enough.
We were about to cut the project when Dell called us and told us that the only way to reduce the price of the 600 servers further was if we signed some sort of paper saying that we used AMD processors in our previous project and this was a replacement project. This way they could get a big rebate from Intel under a certain program provided by Intel.
I just couldn't believe that Intel was ready to go that far...
If that's not a coincidence - I just finished a benchmark comparison of SATA vs. SCSI in 2 Dell server configurations to be used uses as mail servers.
I am quite satisfied by the SATA performance but I had trouble with the linux drivers.
I'm very surprised that this study didn't even mention the Adaptec SATA Raid controllers, which are also used by Dell in some of their cheaper configurations.
Here's my benchmark:
http://www.damsys.com/benchmarks/dell-sata-scsi/
I found that in terms of performance the 2 controllers were very close.
Depending on your needs, any of these configurations might be suitable. If you need to have more capacity for the same price you should definitely opt for the SATA Raid setup. If you do not need that much capacity and you want to be absolutely sure in the stability and reliability of your system, go for the SCSI Raid setup, which is based on mature technology with no surprises.
It seems that AMD has already paid Integraph for the clipper patents and according to the description of the case AMD vs. Integraph (January 15, 2004), AMD has settled and obtained a "resolution of all patent litigation between Intergraph and AMD and its customers." I think that Intel should have done the same for its customers but who knows, it is possible that the situation between them is much more complex.
For those of you interested:
AMD Vs. Intergraph
http://www.intergraph.com/ip/cases.asp?caseid=C04
On April 12, 2004, AMD agreed to settle its DJ action against Intergraph and to take a license to Intergraph's Clipper patents. Under the terms of this license, AMD paid Intergraph $10 million and will make additional cash payments equal to 2% of the AMD Computation Product Group's pre-tax operating profits, if any, for the 2005 through 2007 calendar years, subject to a limit of $5 million per year. The settlement provides a license to AMD and its customers for Intergraph's Clipper family of patents and provides for the resolution of all patent litigation between Intergraph and AMD and its customers.
There is a very interesting article in the last edition of Fortune. I think AMD got it right this time around.
:
s /0,15114,724543,00.html
:(
My favorite quote
AMD CFO Rivet explains
"As hard as we tried to win the hearts and minds of CIOs, with the desktop as our focus we were going to fail. They made their decisions with the server on down. When Intel had 100% of the x86 server market, it could charge whatever it wanted and use that money to beat us on desktops. We had to be in the profit haven".
Ruiz (CEO of AMD) calls the server-led approach "do or die" for AMD: "If we hadn't pulled this off I would have shut the door"
From the Fortune article:
AMD: Chipping Away at Intel
CEO Hector Ruiz came from humble roots to propel AMD into the big leagues.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/article
You need to be a subscriber to read the whole article
Microsoft is already doing it with the XBox.
Hidden 512 byte initial startup ROM in MCPX
Microsoft hide startup code in the MCPX which tries to see if the BIOS is approved by Microsoft before allowing it to run - MICROSOFT ONLY
Cryptographic signatures in the BIOS
Microsoft attempt to use very strong cryptography to only allow a BIOS approved by Microsoft to run - MICROSOFT ONLY
System Monitoring Device Crypto challenge
Unless the BIOS responds soon after startup with a cryptographic sequence to the SMC, it will be reset - MICROSOFT ONLY
RSA Encrypted hashes on Applications
Ridiculously strong crypto on the applications (2048 bit RSA, double the keylength many banks use) means that only Microsoft programs can be run - MICROSOFT ONLY
Also, contrary to what you might expect, McDonald's France is the most profitable McDonald's in Europe. The French head of McDonalds is believed to become the CEO of the European if not the World operations after the chairman and chief executive officer of McDonald's, Jim Cantalupo, recently died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 60.
What's This? The French Love McDonald's?
But this is way off-topic...
All the McDonald's restaurants in France offer free Wi-Fi access. There are about 100 of those in Paris alone.
I know a lot of foreign correspondents use them just to send their article. This is in case they are far from their hotel. Most of the hotels have Wi-Fi, as one might expect.
Actually in Paris the parking machines don't accept coins anymore. You have to buy a special card that you can refill.
There were too many broken machines by the Romanian mafia.
It seems that every other day there is a big article or TV show that reveals how advanced Estonia is in every hi-tech domain.
Let's just not forget that Estonia is a really tiny country with a population slightly over 1 million people.
It is very easy to introduce such initiatives on such a small scale.
Most of Paris has free Wi-Fi now offered by the Paris municipality, and this in terms of population is bigger than Estonia. I don't see anyone bragging about it.
The other day they showed on TV how advanced Estonia is. You can pay your parking lot or buy flowers by SMS. Wow, that's really advanced and even if it so, I don't see how practical it can be. Come on, lose 2 minutes to type and SMS instead of paying by cash or credit card....
Don't forget CommuniGate Pro which runs on Linux too (+ 25 other OSs)
t ml
http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/default.h
It can be used instead of Exchange. I won't be lying if I say it's the Ferrari of all e-mail servers.
The additional MAPI license you have to pay for gaining Exchange functionallity is a bit steep though.
MAPI Groupware License Number of concurrent users Price
Small Office
25 users US$1,199.00 edu
Professional
50 users US$1,999.00 edu
Departmental
100 users US$3,499.00 edu
Corporate
400 users US$9,999.00 edu
Enterprise
1000 users US$19,999.00 edu
ASP
>5000 users US$CALL edu
We use Stalker's excellent Communigate Pro as our corporate e-mail server and in a recent version they added support for Microsoft's SPA.
It is true that SPA is a pure Microsoft authentication protocol used for avoiding to send the password in the clear. I think the specs are not published. The only e-mail server that officially supports it is Microsoft Exchange and on the client side you have Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express on the Windows side and Outlook Express and Entourage on the Mac side...
Of course we also use 128bit SSL so the need for SPA is irrelevant.