dirutz writes "ATI is at the top according to market share, but nVidia is catching up. Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies."
With all the talk about how the RBOCs should start building out fiber-based video networks instead of relying on the satellite approach, one would think that the fiber deployments should be happening in full force in 2005. Verizon (NYSE:VZ) is favoring a FTTP (Fiber To The Premises) strategy, whereas SBC (NYSE:SBC) and others are more inclined to a FTTN (Fiber To The Node) approach.
No doubt that FTTN is the "quick fix" method, being faster and cheaper, however there are risks (i.e. is there sufficient bandwidth for when the loop length exceeds a certain threshold, or for HDTV). Also, the standards issues persist (VDSL or ADSL2+?) and then, there is also the question of the cost and availability of the set top boxes.
FTTP is slower, and entails a higher upfront cost, but it should give Verizon the best network asset among its peers. But the buildout will be slow, as Verizon plans to launch FTTH to 10 million homes over the next five years.
SBC's Project Lightspeed is highly ambitious in terms of their video share gain assumptions, which call for a higher portion of the pie than what DBS players get today. But their roll-out pace, opex and capex estimates presented in November of last year look reasonable. However, despite the fact that these numbers were well received by Wall Street, some naysayers still point to past experiences as the best predictor of how long this deployment will take (who remembers Project Pronto?).
Another factor that might definitely dampen the RBOCs pace of fiber deployment is the potential SBC and AT&T merger. Om Malik highlights a Merrill Lynch report that should the deal close, US wireline CAPEX might decrease by 10% (or roughly US$ 2 billion). The SBC and AT&T were planning to spend about $7 billion of wireline capex this year, but a combined organization would mean a shrinkage of 30% (or $2.1 billion). Of course, some of this reduction might also trickle down to Project Lightspeed, as SBC focuses on integrating the AT&T network. In such a scenario, it remains to be seen whether or not Verizon, after seeing a combined SBC/AT&T spending less, will also follow suit.
Regardless, the MSOs will have a significant time-to-market advantage in bundling voice service versus the RBOCs in bundling video with their fiber buildouts.
Students at Johns Hopkins have reverse-engineered the 40-bit encyrption system develoepd by Texas Instruments and used in both auto anti-theft systems ...
According to a survey by Brandchannel Google are no longer classed as the top brand worldwide.
In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year's top spot, but the surprise to many will be Al Jazeera's entry into the top five.
interesting that neither Apple nor Google appear in the Europe and Africa top 5, but Nokia (mobile manufacturer) are, the North America tops are mostly tech while the S. America tops are almost entirely food and drink related with no tech at all.
Sadogopan disssect the Economist's article about Toyota's success:
"- Half of the three million increase in global industry output since 2000 came from Toyota.
- Toyota will soon be making more cars abroad than at home. It has overtaken Ford in global production terms and is set to pass Chrysler in sales to become one of America's Big Three. - In an industry , where hardly any volume producer makes a real return on its capital, Toyota is exceptional in that it consistently makes good returns"
Ten years ago European and American car manufacturers have went to Japan in order to study the Japanes manufacturing methods. Some years later many car manufacturers on the island have been close to bankcruptcy and have been the prey of their admirers. Toyota survived and learnt more than anybody else. What I learn out of it - It is dangerous if your competitors admire you.
Via Scoble.
Yoon Eui-sik, at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), has developed a tactile sensor that would give robots a sense of touch similar to humans.
The sensor is made of a lattice of copper electrodes placed on a film of synthetic rubber that feels like human skin.
The sensor can recognise stimuli from a distance of one millimeter and identify the exact shape of letters when they placed a stamp on it lettered.
The team's goal is to develop a perfect tactile sensor that can perceive temperature and forces operating horizontally.
Related: last year Tokyo engineers unveiled a tactile sensor last year, but it could only recognize stimuli 2 millimeters away from the sensor, and since it was made of plastic lacked the softness of human skin.
Via Digital Chosun.
greysky writes "This story on Foxnews.com reports that as part of the larger World Social Forum, Barlow spoke on how open source software can help alleviate financial problems of developing countries: "Already, Brazil spends more in licensing fees on proprietary software than it spends on hunger"." NPR talks about how Brazil plans to switch 300,000 machines over.
It looks like Yahoo plans to open up a new revenue stream by licensing stock quotes and other financial data. ZDNet's story: Yahoo to feed its own stock ticker service and the Marketwatch.com story: Yahoo Finance builds licensing biz, offer...
In the past few week's, a couple members of Google's leadership have been sharing their thoughts and views in public forums. First, Google's VP of Engineering Adam Bosworth, spoke to The Gillmor Gang (you can listen online) about future search...
From Adam Fields weblog:
Some guy tore apart his PS2 controller, connected it to the parallel port on his computer, and wrote a script to press a large number of button combinations. He used it to figure out all of the cheat codes for GTA San Andreas (including some not released by Rockstar, apparently).http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1411251
This is a great example of a "class break" in systems security -- the creation of a tool means that this same technique can be easily used on all games, and game developers can no longer rely (if they did before) on the codes being secret because it's hard to try them all.
: As if the old ones weren't enough, Acacia has bought out 120 more patents related to media and technology, from Global Patent Holdings, a holding company comprising of 27 patent portfolio companies...
Acacia paid $5 million in cash and issued approximately 3.9 million shares of Acacia Research--Acacia Technologies stock, and will pay an additional $2 million in cash over two years.
For all the news on controversies related to Acacia, read our dedicated company section...
One of the pillars of Internet communications is the ubiquitous WinZip. While the .zip format that it uses is in the public domain (and originally the creation of Phil Katz), WinZip unarguably makes the most popular Windows client-side .zip implementation:...
The inboxes of prominent California medical and biological researchers are beginning to collect inquiries from out-of-state undergrads, post-docs and well-placed scientists interested in stem...
A cluster of neural cells were derived from human embryonic stem cells in the lab of UW-Madison stem cell...
LWN has the best explanation of the next steps in the software patent debate in Europe I've seen yet. At least, I can understand it. I can't vouch for accuracy, because I have no experience in EU law. But I think you'll find it of interest, and it's the first time I grasped the process in my mind clearly. At all, actually. On February 2nd, the article says, JURI is set to decide whether or not to restart the procedure. I also have some news. Two Groklaw readers in Denmark say it's in the papers there that Denmark is joining Poland in trying to slow the vote down long enough for a restart, hopefully. That's the good news. Here's the bad. Guess who is headed to Europe and arrives the day before the JURI meeting on the 2nd? Bill Gates himself. This is getting to be like an old James Bond flick.
Wait a second, some dude in California gets 16 months in prison for stalking his ex-girlfriend by attaching a GPS
tracker to her car, but it’s perfectly legal for the police
to do the same exact thing without a notifying you or obtaining a court order? Yeah, we know, there are some legal
subtleties involving the right to privacy here, but it seems like if it’s illegal for the police to tap your phone or
email without a court order, it should be illegal for them to add a GPS tracker to your car, too.
[Via Online Blog]
The U.S. Copyright Office wants comments on
"the issues raised by 'orphan works,' i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public."This is wonderful news, and a sign of that people like Larry Lessig are making progress in educating the powers-that-be on the issues.
Public Knowledge has a good summary.
The Trademark Office is now making file wrappers (the trademark application file) available online.
Here's the link.
It's pretty impressive.
..and clickz give them a platform to do it on.
Search engine marketing firm LookSmart blamed its disappointing fourth-quarter results on its failure to pursue advertisers for keyword categories that generated high query volumes.
LookSmart reported a loss of $1.5 million for the quarter, on revenues of $16.5 million. Both figures kept with revised guidance the company issued earlier this month.
"Our sales effort wasn't deep enough or effective enough," said CEO Dave Hills, speaking on the company's conference call announcing earnings. "We didn't focus on the categories that would drive the business forward."
This was due to a failure to track query volume in a detailed enough manner, said Hills. As a result, the sales staff wasn't aware of categories with underutilized inventory.
Since when were they an SEM?
SEW reports that Google have moved to using Answers.com for their definitions - the links you find for your keywords at the very top of the page after querying.
This is cool. Yesterday i posted about Answers.com and expressed a wish to see a tab or some kind of integration into a major SE - now i have it! Danny S had reported previously on this but i missed it, sometimes the headlines fly by to quickly to catch everything on any given day...
Im going to enjoy having that on Google, i only used Answers.com for the first time yesterday and was much impressed :)
Bookmark the EFF page on the building Supreme Court case
about P2P companies; it links to every brief filed, and they are pouring in now. Neutral and supportive (of the
petitioners, the content companies) briefs are coming in now; briefs supporting the P2P case are due on February 28. At
stake: the landmark Betamax decision of 1984, which establishes the legitimacy of technology that allows both
infringing and non-infringing uses. Read Fred von Lohmann’s
statement of the importance of Betamax.
Emily Gertz: Climateprediction.net, the project using thousands of personal computers worldwide to predict scenarios for global warming, announced its first round of findings at the international climate...
Scientists have begun producing chimeras— hybrid creatures that are part human, part animal.
In 2003, Chinese scientists fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days before the researchers destroyed them to harvest their stem cells.
At the Mayo Clinic last year pigs were created that had human blood flowing through their bodies.
Irving Weissman, from Stanford University in California, has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human.
Later this year he may try to inject human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice, giving the animals 100 percent human brains.
Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior.
Weissman hopes the experiment leads to a better understanding of how the brain works, which would be useful in treating diseases like Alzheimer or Parkinson. For scientists indeed, more humanlike animals make better research model for testing drugs or growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans.
Not all chimeras are considered troubling: faulty human heart valves can now be replaced with ones taken from cows and pigs; and for years scientists have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals.
What's problematic here is the mixing of human stem cells with embryonic animals to create new species.
While conceding that these studies would lead to some medical breakthroughs, many believe animals have the right to exist without being tampered with or crossed with another species.
Via Slashdot < National Geographic.
David Pescovitz:
MOJO
music magazine's list of the Top 100 Soundtracks of All Time is phenomenal. Out of the top 10, the only one I have is Number 4, Miles Davis's "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud," and it's one of my favorite jazz albums of all time. I want every one of the rest! Vinyl would be preferable, especially since so many of the albums have stunning cover art.
Link (via MetaFilter)
Commissioner Kevin Martin most likely. As it stands now, it appears the most likely replacement for departing FCC chief Mike Powell is commissioner Kevin Martin - who if you recall had several spats with Powell in the past over broadband deregulation. While both support deregulation, Mar..
AP: California regulators suspend wireless customer protections. California utility regulators on Thursday suspended an 8-month-old crackdown on abusive practices in the wireless telephone industry, rebuffing the protests of consumer activists and the state's top law enforcement officials.
BT develops a new search system for Tate's galleries that will help art lovers track down works they like.
...
Rather than search by the name of an artist or painting, users are shown a selection of pictures.
Clicking on their favourite will change the gallery in front of them to a selection of similar works.
It's interesting that the Tate is playing with an idea that until now has mostly been used by Amazon and friends to goad you into buying just one more book to get that free shipping... --dr
Unbelievably enough, a Jupiter analyst, Michael Gertenberg, has written an opinion piece which ComputerWorld, unbelievably enough, has printed, cautioning businesses that they might want to think twice about switching from IE to Firefox because "Firefox lacks the ability to run Microsoft ActiveX code." [Groklaw jaws drop all over the world in unison] You may think he was doing a parody for Onion, but I think he's serious. Yes, friends, I believe we are seeing the birth of the anti-Firefox FUD. Here's the man's so-called "opinion":The reception that Firefox has received from consumers and the press might tempt business users to switch browsers, but there are some good reasons not to. Many mission-critical applications have been built on Internet Explorer, and most organizations don't have the budget or resources to recode them. In addition, PCs' application loads need to be properly tested to ensure that nothing breaks with the addition of a different browser. In the near term, many business users will be better served by keeping Internet Explorer and installing security updates as they're released. If they aren't dependent on Internet Explorer technology, however, some end users could use Firefox for their daily Web surfing while reserving Internet Explorer use for sites that require it. . . . If Microsoft is spurred by Firefox's success to put more resources into Internet Explorer, it would help create a better experience for both businesses and consumers. That might even happen before Longhorn ships. Well, FUD with a triple capital F generally meets with a Groklaw response, but before I could even warm up the engine, a Groklaw reader, Dr. Tony Young, did it for me.
Why Arrowhead May Outshoot The Nanotechs (
href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_06/b3919152_mz027.htm">Business Week)
Arrowhead signed a pact in early 2004 with California Institute of Technology to fund Caltech's nanotech research in exchange for the rights to market future products. Karsten Siebert of Midas Research rates Arrowhead, which has yet to make a dime, a "speculative buy." The company could be the "wild card" among the nanotechs because of its close ties with Caltech, Siebert says. More here
NanoBot Backgrounder
Will NVE get your Moto working?
Garbage picking
: During the earnings call, outgoing CFO John Connors offered some guidance for the rest of 2005.
-- Connors expectations for MSN with a projected 3Q 2-7 percent decrease and a smaller single-digit increase for the year. "MSN has been performing well in advertising but those results have been masked due to the decline in access revenue. The business is in a fiercely competitive space. Microsoft will have to do what it has always done -- innovate relentlessly and make important investments like our 'Clarity in Advertising' program ... This will reduce short-term monetization."
Mobile & Embedded Devices is projected at 30 percent growth for the year with revenue just over $300 million. Microsoft is banking on continued momentum propelled by new devices.
: Dow Jones disappointed analysts and shareholders today with results that fell short of expectations. DJ had revenues of $437.2 million, up 4 percent year to year, and profit of $35.6 million (43 cents a share) , down from $44.3 miilion (54 centet a share) last year. The profit per share was the same as 3Q04. The acquisition of MarketWatch -- described by CEO Peter Kann as a " bold initiative" -- and the costs associated with launching a new weekend edition will drag down 1Q05 results.
-- This is an actual paragraph from Rich Zannino's prepared remarks: "Moving on to Electronic Publishing, we continued to improve our products and grow our revenues. Fourth quarter revenue was $101 million, up 21%, driven by the acquisitions of Alternative Investor and vwd together with 9% organic revenue growth driven by a 15% increase at Consumer Electronic Publishing and a 34% increase at Indexes/Ventures, partly offset by flat revenue in Newswires core business." Right.
-- A 22-percent increase in advertising and a 9.5-percent increase in circulation revenue fueled that 15-percent increase in Consumer Electronic Publishing.
-- Electronic Publishing had revenues of $381 million for FY04, up 18 percent, operating income of $79 million, up 16 percent and margins of 20.7 percent down slightly from 21.1 percent.
Update: From Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine: "We have been impressed at DJ's efforts to control its own fate over the last few years, but are struck by a sense that it still believes the current economic environment is an aberration rather than, perhaps, a new reality."
sriram_2001 writes "Microsoft has just had a record quarter where their profits have doubled from the previous quarter. Total sales are at $10 billion, exceeding both internal and external expectations. Microsoft has attributed the rise in earnings to increased server sales (where *nix-based systems are supposed to be doing well) and more XBox units being sold. For a company that most Slashdotters would say is on the decline, Microsoft sure has weird financial results!" To put it in perspective, Microsoft's income is about the same as New York State receives in taxes - below California, and well above the other 48 states.
The United States comes in a mediocre 45th in a just-released ranking of environmental sustainability, out of 146 countries. Finland, Norway, Uruguay, ...
FINALLY!!! A new update to the Guide (if you know of any sites/programs to add...please let me know)
PatentMatic. Free. Enter patent number and it gives you a summary page with abstract and related patents and a link to download a PDF copy of the patent. Coverage: "European (EP), United States (US), 'World' (PCT/WO) and Japanese (JP) patents."
PatentMatic's site includes a "kind codes" key. Great way to figure out what "A9" means.
'[The Gambling] industry spends a lot of money keeping track of who plays - recording high rollers' drink preferences and dogs' names, but also watching who's doing what on the floor. [...] Given this, the fact that it would be looking at using RFID to keep track of chips, and to help refine their ability to monitor what players are doing, makes perfect sense.'
foxed writes "HP has settled a patent dispute with Intergraph. Intergraph claim the caching in Intel's Pentium processors violates their patent. Intel, AMD, Dell and Gateway made similar settlements last year."
sebFlyte writes "A new grid computing climate research project, climateprediction.net, has come up with its first major results, and they're really not good news for the planet according to the BBC. The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought."
2005 is the hundred year anniversary of Einsteins annus mirabilis (miracle year), in which he published five notable papers, any one of which would ...
Cory Doctorow:
This company is manufacturing and selling Hiëronymus Bosch action figures!
(Thanks, Mack!)
A third of senior web users have high-speed. Nearly a third of seniors (over 65) who browse the web utilize broadband connections, according to new data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The group states that while Seniors as a whole stay away from the internet, there's a group ..
Those crazy kids from Downhill Battle are at it agin. They've just announced a nationwide campaign to screen the award-winning documentary Eyes on the Prize in major cities all over the country on February 8 as an act of copyfight civil disobediance:
At 8pm on February 8th we will celebrate the struggle and triumph of the civil rights movement with screenings of Eyes on the Prize Part 1: Awakenings. Eyes on the Prize is the most renowned civil rights documentary of all time; for many people, it is how they first learned about the Civil Rights Movement (more about the film). But this film has not been available on video or television for the past 10 years simply because of expired copyright licenses. We cannot allow copyright red tape to keep this film from the public any longer. So today we are making digital versions of the film available for download. Join us in building a new mass audience for this film: organize or attend a screening in your city, town, school or home on February 8th.
J.D. Lasica, in a Reason article on Michael Powell's "invisible legacy" (emphasis & hyperlink, mine):
In telecom policy, Powell lived up to his deregulation rhetoric. But there's another legacy Powell is bequeathing us, one that has been scarcely mentioned in the press: the FCC as Federal Computer Commission...The larger problem is that Powell and the FCC are treating us as consumers rather than users. The federal agency has essentially endorsed Hollywood's line that digital televisions, personal video recorders, DVD recorders, and computers are no more than playback devices for Big Entertainment content rather than intelligent machines that can store, alter, remix and share digital bits.
Amazon's A9 search engine is rolling out a visual yellow pages, providing phoos of the busiensses listed. This may have some effect in reducing consumer fraud, but also removes a primary advantage of the Internet, which is that nobody knows you're a dog.
The AT&T of today is a weak shadow of its former self. SBC is one of the powerhouses among the regional monopolies.NY Times: SBC Said to Be in Talks to Buy AT&T. A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984.
This deal, by itself, wouldn't do much to disrupt the marketplace immediately. But it's a harbinger of trouble.
The worry is on the data side. Voice is already moving into the data sphere as VoIP, and will someday be seen as a small add-on to data.
SBC is one of the most arrogant of the "Baby" (!) Bells. But all of them, assisted by an FCC that has been determined to let the phone and cable duopoly control data access, are moving to throttle the most important competitive market of the future -- broadband -- by insisting on absolute control over the wires they've installed based on government-granted monopolies. This local duopoly makes other kinds of consolidation look tame.
Someday, wireless broadband could help. But competing wireless systems have to connect to backbones and their local nodes. If the Bells can take over the companies that provide such data access, they can be anticompetitive in new ways.
I predict a slew of deals like this, where the regional Bells take over the long-distance and backbone companies, with little regulatory concern. Then we'll be even deeper in the soup.
Today’s the first anniversary of the MyDoom.A worm. According to an email I received earlier today from MessageLabs, ‘the world's leading provider of email security services to business’, it was a day that “changed the virus landscape forever”:
27 January 2005 - At 13.26pm on 26 January 2004, MessageLabs, intercepted its first copy of W32/MyDoom.A. Within the first twenty-four hours, the company had stopped over 1.2 million copies. MyDoom.A, which achieved a peak infection rate of 1 in 12 emails, has proved to represent a landmark in the history of computer viruses, and the legacy lives on..
I’m not sure whether this is just a coincidence, but I’m told by folks at Network Box of a fresh attack by Bagle: “Depending on the next few hours, this could be a large attack,” says Network Box’s Quentin Heron:
Network Box Security Response is tracking several new variants of the Bagle Internet worm… We are seeing thousands of blocks on these variants, from dozens of sites in Hong Kong. We are checking worldwide infection rates at the moment, but this looks extensive.
For those of you who follow these things, the worm matches signatures from Kaspersky Labs of Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.ax and Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.ay.
I’ll keep you posted.
Thomas Hawk wonders.
Now I know that Google was criticized a while back regarding the staleness of their images and that an upgrade was promised but I'd yet to see anything official announced. Over the past two weeks the traffic being driven to my site from Google's Image Search has continued to grow and (if you combine their various international sites) Google Image Search has now become my top referring entity to thomashawk.com......
...If I do a search for "rain" under large images, my photo titled "San Francisco Rain" (see below) is on the first page of over 270,000 large images of "rain." Wow, how did I get so lucky? Is it because the picture is actually pretty good as I'd like to believe? Is someone manually reviewing and ranking images at Google? Or is it because I publish using blogger or that I upload my photos to the internet using Hello Picasa (both Google properties)?
UPDATE: Reader Miguel Cuesta shows that Google Image has been updated - it now has Abu Gharib images, the source of the original posting on how stale the image index had gotten.“Advanced Reality Inc., a company specializing in peer-to-peer collaboration technology, has recently announced Jybe, a free beta release of a new browser based collaboration service. Jybe enables you to use your browser as the delivery mechanism for co-browsing and PowerPoint presentation sessions that you can invite people to attend.”…
Direct and Related Links for 'Collaborative Browsing Toolbar: Jybe (Free)'
This year has been declared the World Year of Physics. Why 2005? To celebrate 100 years since Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the U.K. and Ireland it is being called Einstein Year, but there are many events planned around the globe.
If you're an inveterate reader of blogs, then you're probably ready for the latest phenomenon roiling the Internet: social networking software (SNS). SNS enables the development of so-called "Friend of a Friend" networks (FOAF, for short) such as Ryze.com, Linkedin.com, and AlwaysOn.com that have come to the fore the past couple of years. MySpace.com, designed for the high school and college-age crowd, also has grown rapidly. These online personal or business networking sites are exploding in use, often adding tens of thousands of new users every month. Like the enormously popular dating site Friendster.com, all these sites are based on the "six degrees of separation" principle. That's the notion that any two random people on the planet are connected by an average of six acquaintances -- a claim that has been around for some time and supported most recently by a 2003 study reported in the journal Science.
: Quotes [paraphrased] from RealNetworks' CEO Rob Glaser on Q4 conference call:
-- Increase in ad-supported revenues--$19.1 million of revenue in 2004, up from $8.2 million in 2003--mainly due to Google relationship
-- Comcast relationship (on music side) is going very well.
-- Video/SuperPass now has lower content acquisition costs...
-- Total premium subscriber growth in video flat--discontinued CNN and Nascar video offerings to focus on more profitable products...
-- $15 million spend in litigation expected in 2005
(
) Rob Glaser, on the music and games market. Download the 8.09 minute (4.66 MB) audio, an excerpt from the conference call...download here...
Some highlights from the clip:
-- RealNetworks' relationship with Comcast: premium radio provided to all Comcast high speed subscribers
-- Music and pricing: there is secular trend going on: the move to digital music. We are a participant in the overall category growth, along with Apple. We have a different take and play than Apple...
-- CFO Ron Goodman: on dropping CNN and Nascar relationship...a conscious decision.
-- Competitive landscape in music: We are not counting in university subscribers. None of our competitors break down actual usage of on-demand songs. our user base is very very active...
-- Mobile arena: we will look at mobile music down the line...right now it is too nascent.
UPDATE: According to the Billboard Radio Monitor, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin denies any such talks with the XM chair or CEO, and states that any chances of the government approving such a merger would be slim.
The New York Post reports that early discussions are going on between executives of both XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio regarding a possible merger.
"While talks have not advanced far, executives from both sides have been meeting lately to discuss the possibility of a merger, according to several sources close to the matter.
Sources say the executives have not yet discussed price. They have, however, been weighing any potential antitrust concerns that would arise from a deal, which would create a monopoly in the nascent satellite radio business.
The two companies have talked in the past about merging, but the discussions never got to an advanced stage. But in the wake of Sirius' hiring of former Viacom President Mel Karmazin in November, the issue has gained renewed urgency, sources said.
While many people in the media industry say it's inevitable the two companies will eventually merge, sources say a deal could be at least a year away.
The satellite radio industry is currently a Federal Communications Commission-licensed duopoly, and both XM and Sirius are hoping they can convince the FCC to redefine the market to include all content over wireless broadband services.
As mobile technology in the United States advances, XM and Sirius are hoping the FCC will consider satellite radio as part of the broader industry of delivering music and other content through mobile devices, such as cellphones, say sources.
A merger between XM and Sirius — neither of which is yet profitable — would alleviate a price war for premium content and allow the two companies to save significant amounts of money on marketing costs."
Source: New York Post |
InternetNews reported a few days ago that some major tech blogs received "cease and desist" orders from reporting on Windows Mobile 2005 branding. I know that I read numerous stories from CES that Microsoft was merging the brands "SmartPhone" and "PocketPC" in to "Windows Mobile 2005" sometime later this year. Apparently, some sites got more info than the rest of us.
"Peter Rojas, editor and co-founder of the popular technology blog Engadget.com, said there is an "ongoing situation" over a post that went on his site Jan. 5. The article detailed some upcoming features rumored to be in Windows Mobile 2005 for Microsoft's Pocket PCs and Smartphones. The post prompted a cease-and-desist letter, dated Tuesday, from intellectual property lawyer Cameron Alston of the law firm Covington & Burling. The letter to Engadget publisher Jason Calacanis stated the material found in the post infringed on Microsoft's proprietary trade secrets.If you do not act expeditiously to remove access to the infringing material, you may otherwise be liable for trademark infringement, trade secret misappropriation, and/or other remedies at law, including civil and criminal penalties," the letter states."
According to the article, the main infringement was a screenshot of the new operating system that was stolen from Microsoft servers. And how did that happen, exactly? 
By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Not since Godzilla and Mothra squared off have we seen as interesting a contest as that unfolding between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias, in particular Encyclopaedia Britannica. The rapid growth of Wikipedia, and the buzz surrounding its...
Krzysztof Kowalczyk writes:
Napster had a flaw of being centrialized. It was a matter of winning one case to shut them down forever.BitTorrent, Kazaa and other decentralized networks cannot be killed that way but they make it trivial to track down people who upload files. That allows RIAA and MPAA to sue individuals. That’s a very expensive way to fight p2p file sharing but I hear they still make lots of money. And they can always compensate by showing more ads in theaters or inserting ads in the middle of songs. Besides, this is more of a scare tactic: they don’t have to sue everyone who uses p2p because in the end MPAA execs would be the only ones not being sued. They just have to convince public at large that downloading songs or movies is too dangerous, not worth the risk of being sued.
Creating an anonymous p2p network that will make pin-pointing individual file shares impossible on a practical level isn’t that hard. And I predict that in 2005 an anonymous p2p network will rise in popularity rivaling current popular p2p networks.
This might happen as an anonymous overlay network like Tor or as a new, specialized networked protocol.
In December, ExtremeTech—the lone nerdy science officer serving under Commander Ziff Davis as he mines the snowy, ad-rich depths of White Space—started a four-part 'Display Technology Shoot-Out.' I don't know what they were shooting out, exactly, (maybe displays, which would be awesomely unlikely) but it ended up being a great introduction to all the various new television and monitor options out there. When is DLP better than LCD, for instance, or why can't white people dance unless they are famous? At least half of those questions are answered in the series, which is finally up as a whole for your learnification.
Display Technology Shoot-Out: Part I
[ExtremeTech]
Natural phenomena named after Frank Zappa "This series of articles describes a variety of Natural Phenomena - marine, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial - which have been named in honour of Frank Zappa, the smallest being a gene belonging to a bacterium, the largest being an entire planet."
Securing the transfer of information while traversing the Internet requires an X.509 security certificate to guarantee its integrity. Usually, acquiring such certificates from commercial vendors costs a lot of money. Now, however, a new organization called CAcert aims to provide a community-driven free certificate authority alternative.
: As you probably know, in U.S., the Federal Communications Commission has classified cable broadband as an "information service" and therefore shielded it from most regulations that apply to traditional telephone services, and hence lower prices. But if an appeals court decision is not overturned in the Supreme Court, things could change drastically...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit previously ruled broadband from cable companies had a telecom component and should be subject to stricter regulations and overturned the FCC action.
If the appeals court decision stood, cable companies would be forced to follow pricing regulations, contribute to the universal service fund that subsidizes telephone service and face other obligations, said the brief, presented to the court late on Tuesday.
People in our forums are reporting that the main MSN Search site is now looking the same as the beta MSN Search site. I see the same. We could all be among the growing number of people being shown...
Soldrinero writes "After a tough legal battle that began in 2002 (mentioned in a previous Slashdot story), Stan Lee will finally get his due. A recent court decision says that Marvel owes Lee 10% of their profits for works based on his creations. Since three recent Marvel-based movies are in the all-time top 100 for box-office gross, this will be a sizable chunk of change."
gurps_npc writes "An article at CNN discusses the how Phishers have moved beyond the typical email scam. Last month, Secunia (Danish security firm) documented a case where a phisher somehow modified a windows host file so that when you type in the correct url in the address, it redirects you to the phisher site. Worms and spyware are being built for the purpose of phishing, and it is also believed that phishers are attempting to compromise domain name servers. If one of these go down millions could lose their security instantly, even if they themselves have maintened the security of their computers."
Icomera has signed SJ for 85 trains with 3G/Wi-Fi access: SJ is an enormous rail company covering parts of Scandinavia, including Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, with links out of country as well. Their Intercity and Commuter lines comprise 85 trains and they'll all have service by summer. This is the first widespread train rollout in the world, with trials or single lines connected via 3G or satellite uplink distributed via Wi-Fi onboard. SJ carries 70,000 people a year, but that must be actual people, not trips--that's the first transportation company I've seen that's underplayed its numbers. Update: Fortunately, the 70,000 figure is a translation error of some kind. A few folks of the Scandinavian variety wrote in to point out that the company carries 70,000 passengers a day. That's more like it. I was picturing quite empty trains....
editingwhiz writes "Bob Mims of the Salt Lake Tribune has the scoop straight from the courthouse steps: 'A federal magistrate has handed a partial victory to Utah's SCO Group, ordering computer giant IBM to turn over more of its Linux operating system-related program codes. U.S. Magistrate Brooke Wells' ruling, released just minutes after Salt Lake City's federal courthouse closed Wednesday, came in the Lindon software company's contractual suit stemming from Big Blue's alleged distribution of Linux applications purportedly tainted with SCO's proprietary Unix code.' If at all possible, SCO's going to be even more insufferable now -- it has a glimmer of hope."
Derek Kerton writes
"In an unusual, yet surprisingly refreshing move, Ken Kutaragi, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, admitted that Sony made strategic misjudgments when it let its Media division's DRM zealousness reduce innovation and product flexibility in its consumer electronics divisions. Sony owns Sony Pictures and Entertainment, which contains the former Columbia media house. In this case, Kutaragi was referring to Sony's use of a proprietary music format with strong DRM called Atrac, which is the only format their mobile players can read, eschewing the wildly popular but less secure MP3 format. Kutaragi said that the spirit of innovation had been "diluted" by the other divisions in the company. Now that's refreshing. Give the consumer what they want instead of what your sister division wants. Did Sony really think they could drive the world to Atrac? Is that because they've had so much success with Memory Stick or Betamax? When is Sony going to stop trying to push their proprietary formats on the world, whether DRM or other? "
In the past, we've written about how unclear the law is as it relates to virtual worlds such as online games. How do the laws of the real world that you live in impact what happens within a virtual world? For example, if stealing from a character is part of the game, but virtual goods can be transferred outside of the game for real money... the law can get tricky. Someone could claim that even if stuff was stolen in the playing of the game, it cost real economic value. Over in Japan, a woman has been charged with a crime for breaking into an ex-boyfriend's online video game account and deleting various weapons he had collected. She's being charged with illegal computer access, for logging in as him, but you have to wonder where the line gets drawn. What if she, in the character of the game, had managed to take away the same items she deleted from within his account? This case is a bit more clear cut, but there are going to be a lot more cases where the line between the laws of the real world and the terms of service of the game itself get very blurry.
To make it much easier to pass anti-municipal broadband laws, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has drafted "model legislation", a sort of DIY, fill-in-the-box document which state legislators can introduce as a bill to prevent municipalities from deploying wired and wireless broadband networks. If you are a state legislator ...
I enjoy producing VON, THE industry tradeshow for the VoIP Industry and have enjoyed doing so since 1996.
While I was at PTC'05 this week in Honolulu, I heard that the exhibit floor at Spring 2005 VON, taking place March 7-10 in San Jose, CA is now Sold Out!
I thought this was pretty damm cool...and it is just another sign on how mainstream VoIP has become, since more than 225 VoIP focused exhibitors will be with us at the San Jose Convention Center when VON happens the week of March 7th.
The on-line map of the exhibit floor provides a pretty good feel for just how big our show floor really is.
There is not another show where one could find so many vendors, only focused about VoIP and IP Communications -- anywhere -- in the world together -- other than at VON.
Our exhibitor list reflects an international gathering of equipment vendors and service providers that have committed themselves to being at Spring 2005 VON and having an impact.
Special thanks to all of the exhibitors who have contributed to our "sold-out" success!
Text in French of decision against Google re use of MERIDIEN trademark.
No online English reporting as of yet.
Christopher Baus raises an interesting question in the threadlink above when he predicts that within one year Google will be ignoring the nofollow attribute - and i agree.
I boldly predict that in one year Google will give up and ignore "nofollow" meta-data.
Here's why:
- This will be used for reasons other than to eliminate comment spam as Scoble noted.
- Search engines can't determine the difference between comments and links from a blog entry.
- Search engine results will become worse, and not better as a result of the prejudices of linkers.
- Spammers want positioning and visibility and not just page rank, and will continue to spam anyway.
Google won because they were able to harvest the rich data available in the link networks. Link data is Google's number one asset. Today they just admitted that asset isn't as valuable as it used to be. I hope all you Forrester researchers heard that. Plus the value in links isn't just in the page rank. Its in the clicking. Don't want people to visit a site, don't link it. Simple. If Scoble links something it is my experience that it WILL generate traffic regardless of the page rank. This is just admitting that the spammers are winning.
We've been talking about this alot at Threadwatch and the majority of users (the ones involved in the threads at least) seem to share the view that the nofollow will not do a damn thing, and may even be damaging to the web.
So, is the new nofollow a sign of defeat? Is it a stop-gap measure untill something more effective can be put in place or just a knee-jerk reaction to appease bloggers?
Steve Mann 's Seating License is an internet chair with magnetic stripe card reader and spikes that retract when you slide your credit card into a slot on the chair to download a "License to Sit".
The chair illustrates what Mann calls deconomics, the sabotage economics.
You don't buy the chairs. You instead buy the seating. Likewise, "pay per wear" clothing could also save money.
Deconomics makes economic sense. So much sense that it's ridiculous!
If you look at this on purely economic grounds with cold calculations you're missing the human element. Deconomics also provides for chip implants. Those without implants remain standing indefinitely.
Thanks Rheinhold!
In the chairs series: Communicating via chairs, How to have fun with a simple Ikea chair, Zizi the Affectionate Couch, Wearables for everyday objects, Heartbeat monitoring armchair and shirt, Remote furniture.
ANyone has heard of others?
Xeni Jardin:
At Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr on why the FBI "retired" the 'net surveillance project known as Carnivore:
The Fake Carnivore Debate, RIP: The Associated Press reports that the FBI has retired its "Carnivore" Internet surveillance tool. (It actually happened about two years ago, but no one knew about it until now.) The Carnivore debate was premised on a profound misunderstanding of Internet surveillance practices. With the Carnivore era over, it's a good time to look back at how the press was able to get the story so wrong.
Washington D.C. is the third-largest entertainment production center in the USA, behind Los Angeles and New York City. Its rise results from the recent success of last year's maintstream documentaries, including FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and the various Ken Burns creations that now dominate The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 275 individual projects brought crews into the District of Columbia (D. C.) in 2004, prompting some to nickname the area "Docuwood." [Cinemocracy. The Nexus of Hollywood and Washington.]
The buying and selling of future bandwidth. It's estimated that nearly nearly seven-eighths of the city-to-city fiber buried in this country has never been equipped with networking hardware at its endpoints. If you're interested in fiber, this five page EWeek article has some interesting insi..
Jason Schultz @ Deep Links, responding to the news that California senator Kevin Murray has introduced an Induce Act-like bill before the state's legislature:
The bill, introduced in the Senate last week, would make a criminal of anyone who sells or distributes software that allows users to transmit files over a network, if the seller/distributor fails to exercise "reasonable care in preventing use of the software to commit an unlawful act" such as piracy, computer trespass, or dissemination of child pornography.Goodbye innovation; hello regulation. "Reasonable care" could mean anything from the forced design and/or redesign of software to mandated filtering and digital rights management (DRM) -- even the forced installation of spyware to monitor user behavior. ...
From the birth of the Xerox machine to the modern web server, every technology that enables people to copy or disseminate content has had the capacity to be used for some illegal activity. Under Murray's logic, we should have stopped the manufacture and sale of VCRs, dual tape decks, postal services, carbon paper, and any other service or device that could potentially be used in a crime..
Stuart Henshall writes:
The future is voice messaging, not voice mail. Voice messaging only comes into its own when matched with "presence" applications like Skype. It's an important distinction, for voice messaging will be used differently.Voice Mail is typically a voice message that was left when there was a communications failure. The intended recipient either wasn't near the phone or didn't want to answer your phone call. You leave a voice message you have no sense of timing. We call this telephone tag.
By contrast the "voice messaging option" on Skype doesn't require that you try calling the person first. You have their presence, you know at what level of importance you want to put the interruption. In this world the voice messaging function is different. A voice message is less invasive, less disruptive to workflow.
Do we even have to remind everyone that it’s the year 2005 and we still do not have a cellphone that can go a
month without recharging or a laptop we can use unplugged for more than a few hours? We all know what the culprit is:
sucky batteries paired with ever more feature-laden, wireless-enabled, power hungry gadgets. And there’s no Moore’s Law
for battery power, either—the Economist reports that the amount of energy a battery can store is on pace to grow a
mere 8% a year, nowhere near fast enough to keep up with our mobile devices (and it remains to be seen whether fuel
cells will be able to fill the gap anytime soon). Maybe there’ll be a few renegade manufacturers that strip out
everything unnecessary in order to offer a cellphone with extremely long battery life, but since it’s hard to imagine
anyone removing WiFi from laptops (for example), we should probably all just got used to fighting over power outlets at
airports and Starbucks.
[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]
A bit about how tagging and folksonomy could be hacked
Looking for legitimate news on gaming site Spong is like getting your stock market tips from the World Weekly News, but sometimes even Bat Boy gets a good inside tip. Case in point: Spong has discovered, among the details of a press release for an upcoming Need for Speed game, a mention of "simultaneous ship, with the Xbox2 platform," for late 2005. This isn't a huge surprise—we've all expected an Xbox 2 Christmas this year—but it's the first confirmation in print.
Need for Speed Details [Spong via TheInquirer]
I started writing something critical about Google's "nofollow" proposal, which I felt alone in not being enamored with, but I then ran across Matthew Skala's excellent post. He says it all, and says it well. Here are Matthew's main complaints...
In the first cooperative move for nearly ten years, the major search engines have unveiled a new indexing command for web authors that they all recognize, one that they hope will help reduce the link and comment spam that...
AICA Kogyo Company and Toppan Forms Co., Ltd. developed RFID labels that can be directly pasted on metal surfaces (like stickers). They are flexible and can be pasted on curved surfaces.
One of the most important rules of stream ciphers is to never use the same keystream to encrypt two different documents. If someone does, you can break the encryption by XORing the two ciphertext streams together. The keystream drops out, and you end up with plaintext XORed with plaintext -- and you can easily recover the two plaintexts using letter frequency analysis and other basic techniques.
It's an amateur crypto mistake. The easy way to prevent this attack is to use a unique initialization vector (IV) in addition to the key whenever you encrypt a document.
Microsoft uses the RC4 stream cipher in both Word and Excel. And they make this mistake. Hongjun Wu has details (link is a PDF).
In this report, we point out a serious security flaw in Microsoft Word and Excel. The stream cipher RC4 [9] with key length up to 128 bits is used in Microsoft Word and Excel to protect the documents. But when an encrypted document gets modified and saved, the initialization vector remains the same and thus the same keystream generated from RC4 is applied to encrypt the different versions of that document. The consequence is disastrous since a lot of information of the document could be recovered easily.
This isn't new. Microsoft made the same mistake in 1999 with RC4 in WinNT Syskey. Five years later, Microsoft has the same flaw in other products.
Yahoo! has just released their Q4 2004. You can find the numbers and highlights in this news release....
It's kind of obvious that Yahoo will gain some type of blogging solution in the future. It's the only major portal not to offer this, as I've written before: MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search? David...
Robert Scoble has posted confirmation that Google will introduce a new link attribute. OK, then I'll confirm it as well -- I've been told the same by my contacts at Google. Since official confirmation has now been leaked out, I...
Cory Doctorow:
Major networks are changing the way they schedule TV shows, adding an extra minute or two at the end of their programs so that TiVos and other PVRs miss important sections, and so they can charge extra for advertising:
The padding also discourages viewers from clicking their remotes, under the theory they'll be less likely to switch channels if they've already missed the start of a competing program.ABC is unapologetic. "It's not my job to make it easy for people to leave our network," says ABC scheduling chief Jeff Bader. "Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11."
(via JWZ)
Anti-Spyware app checks legitimacy. Security Focus suggests that Microsoft's new anti-Spyware application is doing double duty as an anti-piracy counter-measure. If a user with a pirated version of XP attempts to download the app, the website uploads "GenuineCheck.exe" to that user's ..
A proposed deal between The New York Times Co. and a Swedish media company with ties to the adult industry is raising a few eyebrows in Boston.
Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."
Rick Zeman writes "A Washington Post story details the relationships between phishers, IRC, plug-and-play phishing toolkits, and phantom web sites. 'For the past few months we've started to see phishing attacks from subcontractors, people who buy and use ready-made phishing toolkits and e-mail lists,' Orad said. 'It's gotten to the point where you don't need to know anything about spamming or computer programming to pull this off.'"
belmolis writes " The New York Times is reporting that the bidding is on for the .net domain currently administered by VeriSign. VeriSign's current contract expires June 30th; applications are due today. Three companies are known to be interested: NeuStar, which currently manages .biz, Afilias, which manages .info, and Denic eG, a non-profit that manages the German .de domain. ICANN is bending over backward to avoid any suggestion of bias due to its conflict with VeriSign over VeriSign's Site Finder "service" and has appointed an independent team to evaluate the applications. VeriSign has been lobbying hard to keep the domain and is reported to have received letters of support from Microsoft and IBM."
There's lots of talk today about Verizon's deal with Yahoo to offer a portal service for Verizon DSL customers. I've been avoiding talking about it all day, because it doesn't seem like a big deal. However, with all the press coverage, it does seem worth a mention -- for the specific reasons why this isn't a big deal. These deals represent a broadcast view of the world, suggesting that people need to have online content handed to them in a package, like the way they get television channels. The internet is wide open. I currently have DSL from SBC at home. Technically, it's SBC Yahoo DSL, but I have no idea what the Yahoo part is, because I'm getting the DSL so I have a connection to the internet, and not because of any special content or services I want from Yahoo. Sure, Yahoo will get a few more users, and Verizon no longer needs to worry about what to put on a front page that few people use, but in the grand scheme of things, this deal doesn't mean very much.
Bar Soba, a nightclub in Glasgow (Scotland), is about to offer its regulars the option of having a microchip implanted in their arm that will obviate the need to carry their wallet or queue for entry. It's the same chip worn by VIP members at two nightclubs in Barcelona and Rotterdam and by Mexico's Attorney General.
The size of a grain of rice, VeriChip is encased inside a glass and silicone cylinder and implanted between the layer of fat and skin on the upper arm.
The chip, which has a life span of about 20 years sends out a low-range radio frequency when scanned, supplying the scanner with its unique ID number. How that number is used depends on the database the scanner is hooked up to. In the case of Soba, it will be the balance on a person's bar account.
Steve van Soest, one of more than 100 people who have been "chipped" at Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, believes that: "It would be great if this catches on and you could put all your personal details and medical records on it. If I was involved in an accident, doctors could simply scan me and find out my blood group and any allergies."
Via The Guardian.
Related: an injection of RFID or GPS, anyone?
Civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot, quoted over at Daily Kos: "I would call upon everyone who has access to 'Eyes on the Prize' to openly violate any and all laws regarding its showing."
The very sad backstory is chronicled here [Globe and Mail] and here [Washington Post; reg. req.]. Also apropos is Daniel Love's Powerful Pictures, the video that recently won first place in the Moving Image contest sponsored by Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
In a bit of a shocker, it seems that Sony has confirmed the PSP Updater we first reported Friday as a legitimate piece of software, although prematurely (and potentially harmfully) leaked to the web. What makes it interesting is that among other things, the update will add word processing and spreadsheet software to the PSP, finally following up moves made by Sony last year to consolidate its PDA line and its entertainment line into a single device (Sony still sells its Clie PDAs in Japan, but has removed them from the market elsewhere).
It will be a long while before anyone is actually using the PSP as a mobile computing device—at least until Sony officially releases the update themselves, not to mention peripherals like a keyboard or other input device—but it's an interesting development to say the least. Could a business-class PSP overcome the stigma of being a gaming device?
Sony admits PSP 'update' is genuine [TheRegister]
Update: Liam says I'm wrong:
