|
|
|||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
| 2015 © KickAss Gear | |||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
| KickAss
Gear News Archive: February 2004
January 30th SCO FUD on CNN Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO group, was on CNN yesterday telling everyone his tale of woe about the MyDoom virus. He said that the virus was a vicious attack by the Linux community on his his poor, downtrodden company. The MyDoom virus has been spreading around the Internet for several days now, infecting people's machines and waiting to launch a coordinated denial of service attack on SCO's servers. But considering that Mr. McBride has made millions of enemies around the world, it's not entirely surprising that something like this is happening. What bothers me the most isn't the clogging of my inbox with much viral laden content (that happens every day anyway), but rather that CNN let Mr. McBride spew his FUD on network television without giving anyone else a chance to respond. I would have greatly enjoyed seeing Linus Torvalds on the TV at the same time shooting down Mr. McBride's arguments. But they aren't tech savvy enough at CNN to do anything like that. So as far as the CNN audience is concerned, SCO is an innocent, beleaguered company just trying to get along. Nothing could be further from the truth. January 27th The Beginning of the End for Phony Patents? The US patent office doesn't always get it right. Sometimes patents are granted for stuff that just shouldn't be patentable. Sometimes the US Patent Office doesn't thoroughly investigate prior art, and they end up patenting something that has been around in bits and pieces for years. Bruce Perens, a leader of the Open Software movement put it thusly: "Patent-granting is out of control; half of all software patents should not have been granted, because they do not detail actual inventions. Frequently, they only detail a specific way to make a computer do something entirely obvious using well-known methods. This is not the aim of a patent, but it occurs because patent office researchers lack the time to conduct a proper search for prior art. Too often, companies obtain patents and wait for another developer to trip over their wire. It costs $2.5 million on each side for a typical patent fight. A settlement is cheaper." In fact, many
companies spend all of their time writing patents for stuff they have no
intention of ever making. They write and acquire patents solely for the
purpose of litigating against larger companies that actually lucratively
sell products. One such company that used patents to leverage royalties
from profitable companies is the Lemelson Partnership. The late founder,
Jerome Lemelson, had over 500 patents to his name, but his company
manufactured nothing. Over the last decade or so they used their portfolio
of patents to leverage $1.5 billion in royalty fees from companies that
made computer vision equipment. This equipment included things such as bar
code scanners, and this hidden cost of manufacturing such equipment was
passed on to consumers every time you bought an item that was scanned at a
grocery store. Well those days are gone now. A company known as Cognex Corp. was fed up with the royalty fees and decided to sue Lemelson. They won. Judge Philip Pro of the US District Court in Las Vegas ruled in favor of Cognex, and against Lemelson. This means that companies that actually manufacturer computer vision equipment will no longer have to pay royalties to Lemelson. The big question is, will other federal judges begin to rule against companies that use questionable patents strictly as litigation tools to extort money from manufacturers? These types of cases can be especially egregious when underhanded tactics are used to acquire patents of a questionable nature. Such is the
current ongoing case with Rambus Inc.'s litigation against memory
manufacturers in the US and throughout the world. Rambus was part of a
memory standards committee during a time when SDRAM and DDR DRAM were
being discussed, and the standards worked out. Rambus amended its memory
patent applications during that time to include aspects of the memory
architecture under discussion, and have been using those ill-gotten
patents to extort money from actual memory manufacturing companies. Rambus
has lost several court battles, and has won several court battles, so the
jury is still out so to speak on this case. The case of
SCO versus IBM is somewhat different. In this situation, SCO bought the
rights to old UNIX copyrights, and is now using those to extort money from
Linux users. Their contention is that portions of UNIX have been illegally
transferred to Linux, and therefore anyone using Linux is violating their
copyrights. However, SCO refuses to say what portions of Linux were copied
from UNIX, because they are interested in royalties, which would dry up
quickly as soon as the threat of litigation was gone. January 24th Tyranny of Copyrights I have posted a short discussion of Robert Boynton's NY Times article on the developing battle between copyright, and copyleft, and how this effects you and your family. Check it out here. January 23rd Intel Only Concerned About GHz, Not Performance In a move that will only work as long as their customers remain ignorant, Intel has designed their latest chip, Prescott, with an even longer instruction pipeline than the current P4. We don't know yet how unwieldy the new part will be, but it is certain to suffer even more from branch misprediction errors than the Northwood chip does. Rumors suggest an absurd 30-stage pipeline, as compared with 20 on the Northwood P4, and only 12 on the Athlon64. The end result will be that the first Prescott chips, running at around 3.4GHz, will be slower at running games than the current top-of-the-line Pentium 4. Why does Intel do such things? Because they don't respect their customers. The longer pipeline slows performance, but permits higher clock speeds. It's a zero sum gain, but Intel just wants to be able to say they have the most MHz. Intel knows that that they will sell the majority of their chips to the uninformed masses through companies like Dell, and all that matters in such cases is the GHz label on the box, not real world performance. The AMD Athlon 64 beats the P4 in most benchmarks even when running nearly a GHz slower. This discrepancy between the two chip lines will become more pronounced as the Intel pipeline changes. This move is sure to drive more enthusiasts to AMD's Athlon64 chips. No Silver in OCZ's "Silver" Thermal Compound! Check out this short article at Overclockers.com that shows the complete absence of silver in OCZ's "silver" thermal paste. Compare this with Artic Silver thermal compounds, which deliver as advertised. Come on OCZ, how cheap can you be? January 22nd SCO Says Open Source is a Terrorist Threat You knew that eventually SCO would bring up national security in their anti-open source campaign. Well they now have. It's as grandiose and deceptive as all the other claptrap oozing from SCO has been. SCO has been lobbying Congress about the severe threat to our nation posed by open source software. This move may be their last desperate attempt to further artificially inflate their stock price. The letter is so pitiful, that it is humorous. Get this... they say that the outcome of the lawsuit with IBM will greatly impact on 1) the nation's economy, 2) our nation's ability to lead the world in technological innovation, 3) the nation's international competitive position in the software industry, and 4) national security. Hmm. Sounds almost like Bill Gates wrote it, doesn't it? Maybe he did from behind the Oz curtain. SCO says that each time someone uses open source software, they are robbing a proprietary software company of sales, thus threatening the economy. They also state that open source software is the ultimate example of "dumping", and this will stifle innovation (Hell, Bill must have written this). Finally, SCO says that all of our enemies, including terrorists, can download Linux for free, and use it to attack us, and thus it is a threat to national security. Sheesh! What a load of bull. I can't believe they can say this stuff without bursting out laughing. How many illegal copies of Windows and Unix are spread across the face of the earth, and in the hands of "our enemies"? Just because certain software costs lots of money in the US doesn't mean that millions of people in China and everywhere else don't have free, bootlegged copies. SCO urges congress to pass laws against open source software. Now it's your turn to write your Congressperson. January 20th HL2 Code Theft Arrests Little blurbs are appearing on the internet today that the Feds have raided several homes and confiscated computer equipment in relation to the theft of Half-Life 2 source code. Details are sketchy, but the arrests involved members and acquaintances of a group called Hungry Programmers, but it is not clear if these people were actually involved in the code theft, or are simply knowledgeable about the incident. None of this affects the lateness of the release of HL2, which has been delayed more from not being ready, than from any theft of code. If you're lucky, it will be out by late Spring to early Summer. January 16th Microsoft Can't Stop Itself Like a drunk on a binge, Microsoft can't stop its anticompetitive activities, and remains in denial. Of course it really isn't Microsoft's problem, it's Bill's problem, because he runs the show there, but the result is the same. In Microsoft's latest trip to the Federal Court overseeing their compliance with antitrust laws, Justice Dept. officials claimed that the Windows XP online music shopping feature invokes Internet Explorer, even if the user has a different browser installed. The settlement reached requires MS to allow users to choose which browser to use when shopping for music. Microsoft did not agree that this was a violation of the consent decree (denial!), and said that they were about to change that "feature" anyway. Sure, and Bill is a changed man, who doesn't have to get his way, right? January 15th SCO's Linux Thing Let's face it, SCO makes some really terrible products, they make the least popular version of Unix with a tiny user base, and their version of Linux is basically unknown, and dead. So it's kind of obvious they needed a new strategy, hence they have become another in a long line of IP litigating companies that don't do anything but hire unscrupulous lawyers like Boies et al. to suck money from competitors. The recent announcement that HP earned $2.5 billion from Linux sales must be music to the ears of SCO, who hopes to get their hands on as much of the money earned honestly by other companies as they can. But time is running out for SCO as they must finish turning over all requested documents to IBM under court order. Expect to hear from both IBM, and the Linux community, shortly. January 14th Job Opportunities at SCO If you are so inclined, feel free to apply for such exciting job opportunities at SCO as "Inside Sales Manager" or, better yet, "Internal Auditor". Ahh, that one's got some job security! The job description says you will be asked, among other things, to audit the financial and operating system processes for information integrity of transaction documents and report discrepancies. Any current IBM employees want to take a crack at that one? SCO has finally coughed up the supposedly infringing code to IBM and its lawyers under court order. SCO says that it is not claiming IBM is infringing any code by having copied anything from System V Unix to Linux. Rather, SCO says this is a $3 billion contract dispute! Now IBM has about a week to determine if everything they asked for is included in the relatively small amount of paperwork turned over by SCO. If not, SCO will need to be more specific. Should be fun hearing IBM's public response. January 13th Novell Strikes Back Novell has announced that it will protect its Linux customers from any possible legal actions by SCO. This suggests that Novell feels it has the upper hand in the struggle over Linux, otherwise the legal indemnification could be risky. But based on Novell's recent assertions that they retain the pertinent copyrights that SCO is litigating over, and the fact that SCO still hasn't shown that infringing code was moved from Unix to Linux, Novell is in a good legal position. Recently Novell has begun the process of acquiring SuSE Linux, and SCO has complained publicly that the acquisition of SuSE violates non-competition provisions of the Asset Purchase Agreement. Novell has countered that in the absence of any contractual support, the public SCO statements are in bad faith, and are meant to disrupt Novell's business. As such, Novell reserves the right to sue SCO over this issue. Sounds like Novell is adding ammunition to their arsenal in order to keep SCO at bay, and thus further protect Novell customers from any legal actions by SCO. January 11th SCO Attempts to Blackmail Google As the time draws neigh for SCO to cough up the infringing code they say is in Linux, they have decided to try and extort some money from a company that actually makes an honest profit: Google. Google runs about 10,000 Linux servers, which looks like some easy pickings for the litigious, failing SCO. I will be shocked if Google doesn't tell SCO to get lost. Perhaps they already have. But time is running short for SCO as the court-ordered disclosure date rapidly approaches. My question is, will the Boies Law Firm come up with some sneaky delaying tactic to give SCO more time to blackmail other companies? January 6th Windows Too Complicated and Bloated to Convert to 64-bit An interesting letter from a Window 64 beta tester states in no uncertain terms that Windows 64 is an OS-too-far for Microsoft, and their disorganized, overworked engineering teams. The end result is that there won't be a 64-bit version of Windows for a long time, and when it comes out, it probably will be a tad under-featured compared with current Windows versions. January 5th Open Source Software OK, It's Official A 10 year study of open-source software has concluded that, despite a high failure rate for such projects, open-source software can be better, and produced more quickly and inexpensively than proprietary software. Considering that Bill Gates said his next OS, Longhorn, will cost as much as a moon launch, it's not hard to see how open source could be less expensive. Get Ready for the New Computers! PCs are scheduled for a series of big makeovers this year, ranging from the change from ATX to BTX cases, motherboards and power supplies, to PCI Express graphics cards, to DDR-II memory. By the end of 2004, computers are going to look very different than they are now. January 4th Radeon 9800 XT Mini Review I've posted a very short review of the Radeon 9800 XT video card from ATI. If you were thinking of getting one, you may want to read this first. January 2nd 2004 Bush in 30 Seconds Happy New Year to All!! As my small contribution to starting this new, election year off right, I've posted several so-called "Bush in 30 Seconds" TV commercials that I put together. Hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoyed making them. :) If You Want to Know Where your Burgers Come From, Read This The way meat and meat byproducts are handled in the US is both a scandal, and a recipe for making sure people get sick, figuratively and literally. If you have the stomach for it, read on! And Bon Appetite! Copyright 2004, KickAss Gear |