Conjecture: A conjecture is a proposition that is unproven but appears correct and has not been disproved. If that statement confuses you (and it may if you’re not a student of math), then you understand exactly how I felt during a discussion with Netflix’ Steve Swasey (VP of Corporate Communications – aka “Spin Doctor”). Quite frankly, the man didn’t spin the discussion in such a way to make Netflix anything but a tiny bit ignorant of the topic at hand.
Before I go any further, I should probably tell you what this is all about. Netflix has a feature that allows members to stream movies directly to their PCs. To accomplish this, they use Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Silverlight is basically a web-application framework that provides functions similar to that of Adobe Flash.
Now, with that out of the way, let me give you the gist of the conversation between myself and Mr. Swasey:
ME: Hello, I am a freelance writer for Techrepublic (CNET), Linux.com, and Ghacks.net and I get a LOT of readers asking why Netflix does not support Linux. I plan on doing an article on this very subject and was wondering if I could get your official statement on this very subject.
Steve: Jack, Netflix wants to be ubiquitous on any screen you want to watch TV shows and movies on and we’re working to get on as many platforms as we can. However, Linux currently does not have a Microsoft Silverlight plug-in that’s comparable with Netflix playback. Please let me know if you have other questions.
Back in March I had mentioned that one of the only issues I had to deal with when converting my girlfriend’s laptop to Linux Mint was that her favourite TV show would not stream to Linux. The reason for this is that CWTV, instead of using Adobe Flash, uses Move Media player to stream to Windows and OSX (Move does not support Linux). Because of this if you are on a Linux system you would simply receive an “operating system not supported” message when browsing the page with the stream.
My company computers were hacked in 2005…a three city network went down due to the Bagle virus, specifically referred to as W32/Bagle.J@MM
It was fast, it was tenacious, it spread through Outlook and it was devastating.
That was when I migrated my company computers and network to Linux. Of course I had help and without a good friend who knew what he was doing, it would have never happened…
In Linux, the ritual of rebooting after an install becomes a hazy memory buried in the back of your brain. But this WAS Windows, not Mandriva Linux. With full lungs, XP said to me, “I don’t care what you do in Sparta, but THIS-IS- BOOTLAND!!!” and I had to reboot to try the program… After almost an hour, I was getting closer to getting things done at last.
But then the firewall blocked the anti-Malware program. When I was trying to solve the problem, the firewall showed an alert of a high-rate attempt to access my computer from the outside. And then, it flashed a warning: “the Win32 Sality Virus that disables antivirus programs is becoming too common. Your version of the firewall cannot stop it, but an upgrade of the program can. Do you want to upgrade for free?” A year ago, I would have clicked YES immediately. However, more than an hour and 15 minutes had elapsed and I had not accomplished anything. The missing installation required me to knock off the firewall, but the firewall was asking me to update! This was too much. I felt completely unproductive in front of the computer. I was mad while I thought that this was XP, the most popular OS today. From what I have seen happening to happy users, Windows 7 performs pretty much in the same fashion, except that it requires more computer resources to run properly. That, in itself, is a funny paradox. I buy clothes that fit me; I do not buy shoes too wide for my feet hoping to fatten until the shoes fit. However, Microsoft expects you to drop XP and buy Windows 7 and to buy new hardware if your PC does not fulfill the requirements for 7. So, Windows is an OS to which the computer has to accommodate! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
This week on the show: The Google/Verizon deal, the SFLC defends the GPL again, Canonical tracking Ubuntu installations, Google kills Wave, the Illumos Project revealed and of course lots of neckbeard action.
We talk about an E-Mail from Matt. Matt wants to know how to get a job as a Jr. Linux Admin. We discuss some things we think anyone looking to make this career choice should do.
I have already featured here some of the best web eCommerce software available for Linux. However, I’ve noticed that I left out several other high-quality web e-commerce solutions.
After several months work, Hamish Paul Wilson has announced the release of The Chzo Mythos GNU/Linux Binaries. The Chzo Mythos are a series of adventure games created by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame.
Good news to old time gamers, now you can play Dune 2 on Linux operating system natively (without dosbox or other emulator) with Dune Legacy project. For the uninitiated, (to my best knowledge), Dune 2 is the first RTS game for DOS (by Westwood, then acquired by EA Games) that spawn several other popular games in the genre such as C&C, Red Alert, Red Alert 2, etc.
As was reported earlier this week, id Software has open-sourced Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Opening up these older games under the GNU GPL was done as part of id’s long-standing tradition of putting out the code into the public domain once it makes sense for them a few years after their succeeding engine updates have fully replaced them in the marketplace. The developers behind ioquake3, the project that’s based around the Quake 3 engine that was previously opened up by id Software, is already working on iowolfet and iortcw forks to incorporate this new code, but other free software developers are already utilizing this code too.
Warzone 2100 is a 3D real-time strategy game in a post-apocalyptic setting with a single player campaign and skirmish games against the computer and/or other players over the network. It was commercially published in 1999 for Windows PCs and the Playstation, and in December 2004, the source code and assets were released under the GPL.
Martin Gräßlin, one of the KDE developers that works on the KWin window manager, when not working towards OpenGL 3.0 support for KWin in KDE SC 4.7 has been writing a draft specification for what he proposes as a unified specification for compositing window managers. Martin hopes for this to become a FreeDesktop.org specification and that KWin/Plasma, Compiz, and other compositing window managers would implement this common specification.
The new software from KDE’s recent 4.5 Release Day has been well received by the technical media with widespread positive reviews and recognition of the focus on quality for this set of releases.
The wait is finally over: KDE SC 4.5.0 finally came to my PCLinuxOS 2010 tablet today as part of a distribution upgrade. There are loads of improvements and new features, so I want to run through a very high level review to give readers a hint of what they are in for.
The vast majority of developers that worked on the Gnome project described themselves as volunteers. More than 70% of developers surveyed said that they contributed to Gnome in their spare time. Another 19.93% of developers said they worked on Gnome both professionally and in their spare time. The portion of developers that worked on Gnome as paid professionals was close to 10%.
On the next step down, we have desktop gypsies. These folks might well stay in a distro they know well, but might switch between KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE, and others as their mood strikes. Again, I think it can only help everyone if we try and help these folks make the easiest and smoothest transition between them. Some will stick with a desktop, and some won’t, but making it easier for them to do so helps everyone who switches to that desktop.
The most recent release of Puppy Linux, version 5.1 “Lucid Puppy” has some huge changes which include binary compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04 packages, easier package installation with Quickpet and in the Puppy Package Manager, a new Simple Network Setup utility and more. The official release announcement is here.
I have been using linux for about 4 years. I am by no means an expert but I would consider myself a little bit above average. I don’t usually write on my blog but something urged me to do it this time just so I can spread the word about Linux and this wonderful distro.
Multitouch is just as useful on a desktop as it is on a phone or tablet, so I’m delighted that the first cut of Canonical’s UTouch framework has landed in Maverick and will be there for its release on 10.10.10.
You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today. By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad.
The design team has lead the way, developing a “touch language” which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”.
Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is buzzing with activity once again. With the release date of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick getting nearer everyday, the submissions onto Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr keeps piling on. Here are a few of those wallpapers that I think, are worth mentioning. Click on the links provided to get wallpapers with different resolutions.
One of the big changes that most users have been waiting for is the Gnome 3.0 desktop. The brand new desktop interface won’t be making it into this release however. Originally Gnome 3.0 was scheduled for release in early October which was already cutting it fine for Ubuntu developers to include it. However, the Gnome developers have pushed back the release of Gnome 3.0 by another six months which means that the new desktop may not in fact reach Ubuntu until October 2011.
Following last week’s Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 3 release but landing before the Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” feature freeze this week were a number of last-minute features like X Server 1.9 integration and other updated packages along with the committing of the revamped Ubuntu desktop installer to Maverick. Via this revamped Ubuntu installer it’s possible to install proprietary bits directly like support for MP3 audio files and proprietary graphics drivers.
Our candidate? Lubuntu, a Ubuntu flavor that uses LXDE as its desktop environment. I has everything that Ubuntu has going for it; large community support, tons of packages in the repositories and years of Ubuntu legacy and know-how.
Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia enhanced Ubuntu variant packed with custom wallpapers, themes, screensavers, system sounds and more. With Canonical in the lookout for a new System Sounds theme for upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, all those who want to contribute may want to check out the original Ubuntu Studio sound theme for inspiration. They are pretty darn good IMO.
Some of the people hired for these positions will most likely work on the next versions of the Kindle, possibly integrating touch screens or even creating a color version of the device. But there’s also a good chance these engineers will be recruited to build other gadgets that Amazon is prototyping in its secret labs.
By free software, they do not mean software that is given away at no cost. Lifelong free software activist Richard Stallman uses the French word “libre” to describe his ideal software; it’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) defines four criteria for this freedom: the freedom to run the software for any purpose; to study how it works (to have access to its source code); to redistribute copies; and to publish modified and improved versions.
Latest Firefox 4 nightly builds now feature Tab Sets, the ability to organize your tabs by visually grouping them to match your browsing style, introduced a few weeks ago as TabCandy.
If you have tried the experimental build released at that time, you won’t notice much change except some important bug fixing for improved stability.
James Gosling is usually pretty cryptic in his non-technical writing, but I think if you read carefully, it seems to me that Gosling regrets that Oracle now holds his patents on Java. I know developers get nice bonuses if they let their company apply for patents on their work. I also know there’s pressure in most large companies to get more patents. We, as developers, must simply refuse this. We invent this stuff, not the suits and the lawyers who want to exploit our work for larger and larger profits. As a community of developers and computer scientists, we must simply refuse to ever let someone patent our work. In a phrase: just say no.
This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google is activating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of US market share, Oracle decided to drop the bomb…
I don’t think Google developed Dalvik to work round licensing and patent problems with Java, they developed it simply because Sun’s Java technology wasn’t good enough for what they wanted to do. If you watch Dan Bornstein’s presentation that is abundantly clear. Designing a new virtual machine runtime is hard, but not that hard. The JVM was influenced was influenced by the Pascal pcode system, and the Smalltalk virtual machine architecture from the 1970s has also been very influential. Recently there have been a pile of virtual machines for JavaScript being developed. Thirty years later after Smalltalk-80 the technology of virtual machines and JIT compilation is really mainstream.
In recent months, a number of alleged GPL-violation reports regarding products (tablet computers, mini netbooks and the like) using the Wondermedia WM850x line of ARM SoCs. People have been contacting me, as I was working as VIA Open Source Liaison, and there is the general belief that VIA and Wondermedia Technology (WMT) are one company.
At the same time, though, “I welcome die-hard Fox viewers,” Lih says. “I welcome people who think Accuracy in Media is the last word. Because if you can cite from a reliable source — from a congressional record, from the Census Bureau, from the Geological Survey, from CIA Factbook, from something — then by all means, I don’t really care what your political stripes are. Because the facts should win out in the end.”
While visiting Epcot Center in Florida, a Pennsylvania woman alleges that a Disney employee dressed as Donald Duck grabbed her breast and molested her after she sought an autograph.
One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.
[...]
These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.
Florida real estate developer St. Joe Co. is suing Halliburton Co. over its role in the rig explosion that led to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
I generalise, of course. Environmentalism’s chancel is as accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism or conservatism, and just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular environmentalism – now a global force – offers up in its quest for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn dead end street, where the bins overflow, the lightbulbs have blown and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.
What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for me, now – well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I can’t make my peace with people who cannibalise the land in the name of saving it. I can’t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I can’t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I really mean is saving myself from what is coming.
An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland.
Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes — and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.
Hiring for IT jobs continues on the upswing in the U.S. and Canada as recessionary gloom gives way to cautious optimism, according to various recent polls of employers, who cite networking, security, virtualization and database skills as among the most sought-after.
It’s no secret that many of the world’s largest industrialized nations are somewhat eager to ease their reliance on the U.S. dollar. For months China and Russia have pushed ever subtly, for a new “global reserve currency,” to give governments around the world enhanced economic stability in the event of greater fluctuations in the dollar’s value.
In March 2010, ScienceDaily published a story about an intriguing report investigating the connection between stock-market activity and the frequency of heart attacks.
The researchers, a team from Duke University Medical Center, discovered an increased incidence of cardiac arrest in the United States between January 2008 and July 2009, precisely when the stock market showed a clear decline in the midst of a massive economic crisis.
Although the scientists determined in subsequent tests that this inverse relationship wasn’t quite as pronounced as they believed initially (due to seasonal fluctuations in heart attack rates), their study remains groundbreaking in terms of its efforts to explore a rarely covered topic: the impact of economic patterns on cardiovascular events.
Two senior U.S. lawmakers say they’re “troubled” by the collection of personal data at many websites, and they want details on how much data 15 popular sites collect and what the sites do with the data.
What Tony Smith is going to have to explain to colleagues is why he is rejecting a complaints-based policy that used a URL blacklist that Labor effectively shanghai’d from the Howard Government.
Proposed media regulations in South Africa have raised fears that the government is trying to control news coverage, drawing comparisons to apartheid-era censorship.
If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we’d be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.
Well, our free speech rights are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.
If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.
This means that I can’t buy an book in EPUB format and read it on my hardware or software EPUB reader of choice. Or rather, I can do so only under limited circumstances. For example, I can read a Sony B&N ebook on a Nook, but I can’t read a B&N ebook on a Sony reader. Or, when I Google anything to do with EPUB and DRM, I get a lot of links that seem to lead to instructions for stripping DRM.
But we’ve regularly highlighted smart labels doing cool things, and others are noticing that as well. The New Yorker has a nice article pointing out that there’s still a role for record labels to help a band do all the stuff it doesn’t want to do itself, and that many indie labels have done a good job figuring this out. The article focuses mainly on the band Arcade Fire, and the success it’s had, despite being on a small “indie label.” It mentions the band Vampire Weekend, which has also had similar success.
There’s nothing revolutionary about what their labels are doing. It’s just that the bands generally have a bit more control and are less a cog in a giant machine, allowing them to stay a bit more true to their musical roots. As the article notes, this is “not a radical change so much as a scaling back, a return to a business model that involves fewer people, and concentrates on the product.” Indeed, it notes that the major record labels are still where bands may go to play the lottery — to try to get that one big check. But these more innovative and nimble indie labels are where a band is likely to go if it actually wants to make a career.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks resume today as Round Ten opens in Washington, DC. The full agenda indicates that all the issues will be addressed along with discussions of many smaller matters that have been left until the end. Following the last round in Lucerne, Switzerland (which only concluded 47 days ago), I had several posts on the leaked draft that tried to identify the primary areas of disagreement, the Canadian positions, the U.S. decision to cave on anti-circumvention, the importance of geographical indications in the talks, and speculation on the prospect of the EU walking away from ACTA.
Summary: Microsoft loses its power struggle in the Free/open source community and the OEM channel; One of our readers opines that Microsoft may have been responsible for Hurd’s departure from HP
MICROSOFT is going through some tough times (unless one minds the PR). Fortunately, Microsoft is collapsing as even attempts to “embrace and extend” the free/libre competition bite the dust [1, 2, 3] and Microsoft Gavin spins it too weakly for Microsoft. “Microsoft has reportedly refused to comment officially on the changes,” he writes and “[r]eading between the lines, it would seem that Microsoft’s push for Microsoft-versions of dynamic languages has fallen victim to overall budget cuts and changing priorities.”
Jason Perlow suggests breaking up the company and famous columnist Robert X. Cringley is having a go at Microsoft as well (he “seems to sort of use Mac, not sure that’s true,” says a reader of ours. “But the same points could be used for switching to Linux as well.”):
It’s kind of pathetic, really. Most of these arguments are premised on the notion that if you’ve already wasted most of your adult life using Windows, you’ll be more familiar with it than the Mac, so you might as well waste the rest of your adult life. Which is really the only reason why Microsoft continues to dominate desktop market share: It’s harder to switch than to stick with what you got, even if what you got sucks eggs.
“Yahoo was too independent company and they put Bartz. And SGI too. And HP of 90′.” –gnufreexnadege says: “Not sure Hurd was fired due to Microsoft Retaliation : HP & Microsoft are partners, and HP promote a lot the Microsoft products”
“HP does promote Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn’t forgive competition,” gnufreex tells nadege. “Palm is competition”
nadege responds with: “HP promotes Microsoft due to a special relationship. However, HP is still an independent company. So I don’t think Microsoft will put its own CEO at HP”
Someone who acts against the interests of the organization he’s with, often in favor of some other organization he may be secretly working for instead – a mole.
[...]
Those acts – along with the reward from Microsfot – got him the nickname “the microsoft mole” (google “microsoft mole Belluzzo”) in those companies, and occaionally the term “a belluzzo” is used to describe someone who seems to be acting in the interest of a different company than the one he works for.
For details about Yahoo! entryism, see our Wiki. Earlier today we showed that Newsweek‘s outgoing Managing Editor now works for Microsoft (MSN). Bartz could be just another Belluzzo.
“Also note what they did to IBM’s OS/2, IBM was special partner too,” gnufreex adds. “When you are Microsoft competitor, you are on their hit list [...] That is exactly why they are firing him [...] I mean, not they are not firing him, they are setting the harassment case”
“HP has to be close to Microsoft,” nadege confesses, “otherwise Microsoft will favour Acer or Dell, and HP will lose its leadership. It’s tough to be a Microsoft Partner [...] And believe me : Customers (Companies and end users) want Microsoft products. They won’t accept any huge replacement of Windows.”
Chips B Malroy says: “they will on tablets [...] just look at the iPad”
nadege responds with: “Tablets, OK. Android will perform well” and gnufreex adds: “Yeah, and that is why Microsoft’s want Palm dead, and they need CEO who will kill it. [...] When I said they need CEO to kill Palm, I mean new HP CEO. Hurd didn’t want to kill his product just to please Microsoft, and now has to go. But then again, he is maybe just a rapist and deserves to be fired, and Microsoft has nothing to do with it”
IDG has a new article titled “Did HP Board Have Hidden Agenda in Removing Hurd?”
“New theories on why HP’s Mark Hurd was forced out,” says another headline.
HP has just been sued by a shareholder [1, 2] (shades of Yahoo!) and an aide is leaving along with Hurd. Well, guess who else is leaving? “Palm Prē design lead ejects from HP,” says this report from The Register.
Demi-disgraced HP chief exec Mark Hurd may have been the most-recent high-level exec to exit that company’s Palo Alto headquarters, but he’s not alone in his good-bye drive down US Highway 101.
Thanks to TechCrunch, we now learn that Peter Skillman, Palm’s now-former vice president of design — and the man who shepherded the design of the Palm Prē — has also bailed. An HP spokeswoman tells The Reg that his resignation came “about a month ago.”
Skillman’s departure is no small loss to HP. As the company expands beyond the security of the staid PC ‘n’ server ‘n’ printer markets and dips its toe into the turbulent ‘n’ trendy consumer products free-for-all, it’s going to need all the vision and design expertise it can get.
That cannot be good, can it? Hurd’s ‘Delilah’ says she is sorry and gnufreex writes: “I think Microsoft set him up [...] Because of his Linux related acquisitions [...] I think Microsoft want HP to kill Palm [...] some new Beluzzo might replace him [...] HP Enterpirse Software division (HP-UX and VMS) already got Microsoftie at helm”
The full IRC logs are available to see these claims in sequence. This theory says that they ‘pull a Bartz’ on HP, but evidence is not sufficient.
It was only weeks ago (before Hurd left, followed by the Palm Prē design lead) that HP had filed for a WebOS tablet trademark. It has real potential, but after Hurd officially dumped Vista 7 in favour of WebOS we now learn that Vista 7 is back, almost at the same time that HP put a Microsoft executive (Veghte) in charge of software at HP. Could HP be putting back Windows after dumping Vista 7 from “Slate”? How come?
Last week we showed that there was crime at HP and additional coverage includes:
HP allegedly paid more than $3 million to systems integrators between 2001 and 2006 in exchange for favorable treatment on government contracts, according to DOJ filings.
As the many questions around Mark Hurd’s departure continue to go unanswered, a key aide to the former CEO has also abruptly resigned this week.
The mystery deepens. Caprice Fimbres McIlvaine, formerly head of internal communications at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and a top aide to ex-CEO Mark Hurd, has left the company, following her boss out the door three days after his departure. Her exit is significant because, according to two people with knowledge of her former role, McIlvaine was the key conduit in hiring Jodie Fisher, the actress-turned-corporate hostess/”marketing contractor” who later filed a sexual harassment suit against Hurd, setting in motion the chain of events that resulted in the CEO’s resignation on Aug. 6. McIlvaine resigned effective Aug. 9, HP confirmed Wednesday.
Why HP was wise to put director Marc Andreessen forward as the board’s spokesman on the Mark Hurd crisis.
The delightfully jarring aspect to Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) bombshell news and investor conference calls last Friday was the board member the venerable company put forward as its public face: Marc Andreessen, not so very long ago the enfant terrible of Silicon Valley.
Mark Hurd’s silly exit has little to do with HP’s real problems. As an executive there about a decade ago, I saw a company that was giving up its differentiating value in the name of operational savings, not realizing that by now the Golden Goose of creativity would find greener pastures. But surprisingly, the classic HP tradition of building a great place to do engineering that results in a flood of excellent creative products is being followed…
Back we go to Cringely (the original one) who wrote about “Stupid CEO Tricks” — a post wherein he mentioned Intel for showing that “to a certain extent crime does pay. ”
This week brought two other news events worthy of comment — Intel’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and Mark Hurd’s sudden departure as CEO from giant Hewlett-Packard.
The Intel story is almost as it is being presented in the trade and general press. Yes, Intel has promised in very specific ways to no longer be evil. No, Intel isn’t being made to give back the money it made as a result of being evil, so to a certain extent crime does pay. Of course some will say the money damages were in part covered by Intel’s recent $1.25 billion settlement with AMD, but the FTC also doesn’t generally impose fines. So if you happen to be guilty of anti-trust I guess it is better to be sued by the FTC than by the DoJ, which does impose fines.
Either way, Intel got away with something and the graphics chip makers in particular should be pissed.
AN APPARENT FAILURE TO FIND agreement has led to the US Federal Trade Commission extending by two weeks the time it has to find a settlement with Intel.
The relationship between Dell and AMD has been getting closer lately. Certainly in the days when Dell was an Intel-only shop this sort of deal would have been unthinkable.
What is this case teaching our children? That a slap on the wrist is all one gets for abusing the market? Earlier today we showed that Apple too had been caught using kickbacks, so an Apple manager goes to jail (which is rare, they are usually just fined).
Everything about the Intel/FTC settlement screams of one thing — Microsoft. Redmond’s multi-year nightmare with the FTC, DoJ, and the attorneys-general of several dozen states wasn’t lost on Intel, which is a more rational company and doesn’t want a Microsoft-like anti-trust experience. Both companies are guilty and both are paying something for that guilt, but Intel clearly wants to avoid the decade of pain and distraction suffered by Microsoft.
[...]
Microsoft was paralyzed with the FTC breathing down its neck. Intel is not paralyzed.
Roughly $2 billion in payouts and Intel is a free bird — a rich free bird at that — having proved that crime does pay.
These settlements will effectively pay for themselves in two months at current Intel profit levels.
Had Microsoft been “paralyzed”, then its abuses would not carry on; but they do. █
“Fuck! It took you a year to figure that out!”
–Bill Gates
“That’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve heard since I’ve been at Microsoft.”
Summary: The attack on Android from multiple directions (Microsoft and Apple against phone makers, as well as Oracle against Google) shows why software patents are an abomination
IN the previous post about the “SCOracle” case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] we attempted to find an explanation for Oracle harming its own asset, or at least looking to reduce fragmentation. Oracle has a history of opposing software patents (based on a statement pulled from many years ago) and its recently inherited product, ZFS, is still under attack by software patents.
One company which clearly suffers from software patents is eBay, which is under another attack this summer [1, 2]. Red Hat’s outspoken employee Jan Wildeboer says that “MSFT is cashing innovation tax (aka patent license money) for Android, now ORCL joins the scheme. And you still ask why #swpat [software patents] are wrong?”
Dan Ravicher from the SFLC is still trying to invalidate patents on two genes which relate to breast cancer, not just software patents. From The Prior Art blog:
In a motion filed quietly in late June, Christopher Hansen of the American Civil Liberties Union and Daniel Ravicher claim that remarks made by Federal Circuit Chief Judge Randall Rader at a biotechnology industry event show he may have a biased view of the case in question, Association of Molecular Pathology et. al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office et. al, and should not be one of the three judges to decide the appeal.
Questioning Rader’s objectivity is an unusual move that underscores just how high the stakes are in the case at issue, in which several doctors’ groups have joined the ACLU and PubPat in seeking to invalidate patents on two genes related to breast cancer that are owned by Utah-based Myriad Genetics–and, more broadly, to challenge the legality of the thousands of genetic patents already in existence.
We wrote about gene patents before [1, 2]. They too are a ludicrous (mis)use of patent law — an attempt to own nature, not just mathematics. █
Jonathan Schwartz: “Years back, Sun was under pressure in the market. [...] With business down and customers leaving, we had more than a few choices at our disposal. We were invited by one company to sue the beneficiaries of open source. We declined. We could join another and sue our customers. That seemed suicidal.” (photo by James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
Summary: Further analysis of possible motives in the “SCOracle” case; another look at Apple’s software patents lust
IN PREVIOUS POSTS about Oracle’s lawsuit against Google [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] we explained that it is more complex than it initially seems.
There are some more cartoons about it and plenty of opinions, including some from Carla Schroder (“Oracle on the Warpath”) and from IDG. What we found interesting is the reaction from the Microsoft camp though. We did not find a reaction from Microsoft Gavin, who is busy doing ‘damage control’ regarding Microsoft’s violation of privacy. We did, however, find that the ‘Microsoft press’ and Microsoft boosters like Mary Jo Foley (Gavin’s colleague) have begun advertising Microsoft’s database in the midst of disdain/fear of Oracle. How timely. Microsoft MVP de Icaza led Groklaw to writing (Groklaw has just published another new post: “In the “You Won’t Believe This” Department, Miguel’s suggestion to Google is: “…I can not help to think that Google could migrate Android from Java to the ECMA/ISO CIL and C#. Unlike the Java patent grant, the Microsoft Community Promise for both C#, the core class libraries and the VM only require that you have a full implementation. Supersetting is allowed….Google could settle current damages with Oracle, and switch to the better designed, more pleasant to use, and more open .NET platform.”
“I can’t help but think about what Jonathan Schwartz wrote about meeting with Bill Gates and Gates asking for royalties for patents he claimed were infringed by OpenOffice. Schwartz told him that .NET infringes JAVA patents, and so Gates went away. But why isn’t Oracle suing Microsoft, then?” –Pemela Jones“Like *that* will ever happen. I think he’s completely missed the real lesson to be learned about patents and skating close to the edge. And now, because Miguel wrote this, I must begin to wonder about the purpose of this litigation. I can’t help but think about what Jonathan Schwartz wrote about meeting with Bill Gates and Gates asking for royalties for patents he claimed were infringed by OpenOffice. Schwartz told him that .NET infringes JAVA patents, and so Gates went away. But why isn’t Oracle suing Microsoft, then? Instead, here’s Boies Schiller again, after SCO, with another anti-Linux lawsuit, if we define Linux in the broadest terms. Things that make you go hmm.”
To further expand on that point, Groklaw cites “The Java Trap” and agues: “Just a reminder that Richard Stallman warned developers years ago to watch out for nonfree versions of Java and stick to what became the GPL code. Had they all listened, there’d be no Oracle v. Google, methinks. Money makes people do strange things, but you as individual programmers don’t have to. This is in the live and learn from the mistakes of others category. And may I remind you that rms is now warning about Mono and C#, not to depend on them? When you see others pooh pooh his warning, look at his track record. How often is he right? Extrapolate.”
Huge damage has potentially been done to Java’s reputation. As one writer puts it:
Personally, it’s Ruby on Rails and Hadoop for now. My application has a browser-based front so Ruby on Rails is great and as far as the server is concerned, I use the old fashioned C++. Given how I use the data I use in my stealth app, I will never want to use mySQL. It’s Hadoop for the moment. Now with this Java lawsuit, I will not even consider building a Java-based application. Given a choice, one should never pick uncertainty or maybe even a lawsuit.
An Oracle spokeswoman said: “This suit is specifically about Google and that’s it.”
[...]
Oracle’s suit also underscores the sharp difference in philosophies between Oracle and Sun, which became one of the most visible proponents of open-source software. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a former senior Sun executive.
Apparently, Android is missing AWT and Swing, as Google created its own user-interface toolkit. So, Android would not conform with Java Standard Edition nor Java Micro Edition, which both require AWT. Google loses Sun’s patent grant through non-compliance with its requirements to follow the Java standard.
At a later stage Groklaw was made aware of the Apple connection, which was mentioned here before. Groklaw, which spends some time defending Apple for reasons we do not understand, quotes: “This unexpected move by Oracle sends a strong and threatening message to Google and the entire Android community—specifically that Oracle will use its intellectual property rights to get compensated for innovations around the exploding mobile marketplace. Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison is inserting himself in the middle of an ever-evolving battle between Google CEO (and former Apple Director) Eric Schmidt, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, a long-time friend of Ellison’s.”
Pamela Jones writes: “Ah! Apple. HTC. Now the picture is getting clearer as to the why. So it will come down to facts of the case, and the stupid patent system.” For background about Apple vs HTC see our Wiki.
To say more about Apple and patents, the company “Wants Patent On Video Game-Based iBooks,” according to Slashdot:
Yes, you read that headline right. Apple has applied for a patent for a bicycle concept.
Apple’s love of software patents has already angered one Apple ‘partner’ (FutureTap), but Apple still denies the allegations which were made repeatedly .
There is no “PatentGate.” That’s the word from FutureTap, the company which The Reg reported last Friday was concerned about Apple’s lifting of the look-and-feel from its flagship app and including an illustration of it in a recently published patent application.
I wrote last May about Apptorney IP, an app that facilitated patent and trademark searching on an iPhone by providing direct links to the appropriate sections of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. Now comes an app that takes that to the next level, enabling more seamless searching of patents and trademarks.
Called Banner & Witcoff’s IP Lawyer, the free app from the IP firm Banner & Witcoff provides direct search access to patents and trademarks, as well as to corresponding assignments, without the necessity to connect through a web page.
The app lets you search for patents by keyword, patent number, assignee, inventor or classification, and by keywords or exact phrases. Once you find a patent, you can further search within its text or download a PDF (via Google Patents) of the actual patent images.
Apple is a major part of the problem with software patents. As we showed on Friday, it has a lot to gain from the lawsuit against Google. █
Doomed from the start probably because they were tested on Windows Vista Business Edition SP2, the tests found a marked inability of some software to cope with heavy attacks. As opposed to Windows Vista’s inability to cope, full stop. Virus Bulletin’s crack squad also noted that false positive rates were very high, with legitimate files from Corel, Roxio and Adobe having been falsely identified as being infected.
Yesterday I went over to good friend of mine who has been stuck with Vista for a few years and hates it (I showed him KDE and GNOME, then set it up for his brother in law). Vista is in many ways a mess and the fonts are ugly on some screens (BSODs are an occasional problem too); Vista 7 is more of the same but somewhat improved. According to this new eWEEK readers survey, there are more GNU/Linux users there than Vista 7 users. No surprise.
Windows XP scored nearly 44 percent in a poll of which desktops eWEEK readers use to run their business. Microsoft’s Windows 7 came in behind Linux, while Vista languished with a handful of votes in the “other” category.
In other security news from this month, let’s look at The Register (UK):
A study by web intelligence firm Cyveillance found that, on average, vendors detect less than 19 per cent of malware attacks on the first day malware appears in the wild. Even after 30 days, detection rates improved to just 61.7 per cent, on average.
However, over recent weeks, the botnet is making a comeback of sorts. Spammed messages containing malicious attachment harbouring Waladec agents and disguised as tax invoices or job offers and the like have begun appearing, Trend Micro warns.
The same run of spam messages is also being used to spread fake anti-virus and other scams unrelated to Waledac, and there’s no sign that a new command and control structure, much less a fresh round of spamming, has begun.
Cybercrooks use of botnets to make money by sending spam or launching denial of service attacks has become a well-understood business model.
But the controllers of networks of compromised PCs have other ways of turning an illicit profit, including using rogue traffic brokers to defraud reputable brands. Trend Micro’s write-up of a click fraud scam sheds light onto this less well-known but highly lucrative cyberscam.
“Malware Reaches An All-Time High,” claims this report.
McAfee found 6 million malicious files in the second quarter, compared to 4 million in the first quarter.
We wrote about Zeus in [1, 2, 3] and about Stuxnet/Siemens in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. “Stuxnet Industrial Worm Was Written Over a Year Ago,” claims IDG.
A sophisticated worm designed to steal industrial secrets has been around for much longer than previously thought, according to security experts investigating the malicious software.
Called Stuxnet, the worm was unknown until mid-July, when it was identified by investigators with VirusBlockAda, a security vendor based in Minsk, Belarus. The worm is notable not only for its technical sophistication, but also for the fact that it targets the industrial control system computers designed to run factories and power plants.
“For example, at an energy production plant, the attacker would be able to download the plans for how the physical machinery in the plant is operated and analyze them to see how they want to change how the plant operates, and then they could inject their own code into the machinery to change how it works,” he said.
The Stuxnet worm propagates by exploiting a hole in all versions of Windows in the code that processes shortcut files ending in “.lnk.” It infects machines via USB drives but can also be embedded in a Web site, remote network share, or Microsoft Word document, Microsoft said.
Microsoft issued an emergency patch for the Windows Shortcut hole last week, but just installing the patch is not enough to protect systems running the Siemens program because the malware is capable of hiding code in the system that could allow a remote attacker to interfere with plant operations without anyone at the company knowing, according to O’Murchu.
Summary: Possible new explanation for Microsoft’s bias at Newsweek (including the hiring of Microsoft boosters like Daniel Lyons)
ONCE in a while we show that Microsoft controls many positions in the media. Last year we gave many new examples of Microsoft UK executives moving to the MSBBC and vice versa (there’s a lot more than Ashley Highfield). To those who believe that the MSBBC is objective, here is some news:
The BBC said today it is launching new U.S. edition website along with a redesign with advertising partner HP.
Microsoft is also a partner of the MSBBC, in more than one area in fact. As for MSNBC (Microsoft and NBC), there are accusations being thrown right now saying that they “banned liberal blogger from network”:
Markos Moulitsas, founder of the popular liberal blog DailyKos.com, wrote in a blog post Wednesday that he had been banned from appearing on MSNBC.
Lauren Skowronski, a public relations employee for MSNBC and NBC Universal, MSNBC’s parent company, told Raw Story, “MSNBC is not commenting.”
Most important however is the following news which provides a route for Microsoft to exploit Newsweek (e.g. through former colleagues):
Newsweek.com’s Managing Editor Is Bailing For MSN
Carl Sullivan, managing editor of Newsweek.com, is leaving for MSN. His resignation was announced in a staff meeting on Friday, several sources told us.
Newsweek has been advertising Microsoft is some ways recently. We last highlighted an example just earlier this month. MSN also pretends to be news (like MSBBC and MSNBC) but increasingly it just tries to take over everything and spread Microsoft’s points of view. Microsoft is a marketing company, so it needs that form of control over information. █
Summary: Microsoft is “probably popping champagne bottles this morning with [Gartner's] FUD they can stir up,” says IBM’s Ed Brill
FOR REASONS we gave here many times before, the Gartner Group has a serious conflict of interests. It serves clients rather than provide objective market analysis. Microsoft happens to be a major funding source to Gartner and Bill Gates is a Gartner investor (it’s easy to let a foundation deceive).
According to this reportfrom IDG (Gartner competitor), IBM and Gartner are publicly arguing because Gartner keeps promoting Microsoft, which ripped off Lotus.
On Thursday, Gartner published a report called “Migrating off Notes/Domino e-mail may make sense in some circumstances,” saying that more Lotus customers come to Gartner for advice about moving to other e-mail systems.
The report is much ado about nothing, according to Brill, director of product marketing at IBM Lotus. A headline that better describes the content of the report would be: “Migrating off Notes/Domino doesn’t make sense in most circumstances,” according to Brill’s blog post. However, that name probably wouldn’t sell as much consulting time, Brill said.
Yes, Gartner produces reports for clients because it’s the only thing which pays the bill. It’s not as though it’s done objectively and we gave many examples before. To quote Brill, “My friends in Redmond are probably popping champagne bottles this morning with the FUD they can stir up.” █
“Whether or not it actually represents ‘pay for play’ is, I suppose, in the eye of the individual but it is certainly true that many vendors refer to engagements with Gartner as ‘paying the analyst tax.’”
