News

As if this was a shock to anyone. The creators of the internet have said that the internet is outdated.

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Mr. Roberts isn't the only networking pioneer dissatisfied with earlier achievements. Len Bosack, the 55-year-old co-founder and former chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc., helped commercialize routers, the core piece of networking equipment that allows computers to communicate with one another. Yet he now terms such gear "less and less adequate" for today's Internet needs. Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes. The actions of Messrs. Bosack and Roberts fuel the growing debate over whether the Internet's current infrastructure is sufficient to handle the explosion of bandwidth-hungry services such as Internet telephony and video. In a recent report, Cisco calculated that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 million terabytes, or the equivalent of 40 trillion email messages. If such Internet traffic continues increasing, many believe networks could crash or at least slow to a crawl.

Since acquiring Skype, Skype has been devalued. Ebay is losing money because of the acquisition and what should Ebay do? Dump them...

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On Monday, eBay said it would take a $900 million so-called impairment write-down against the value of Skype. This means that eBay has been forced to reassess the value of the Internet telephony company relative to its overall business today. By recording a charge, the company is essentially saying that it has taken a loss on its original investment. In what looks like an attempt to shake things up at Skype and move the division in a new direction, eBay also said Monday that Skype co-founder and Chief Executive Niklas Zennstrom has stepped down.

No, they aren't buying AJAX... They are buying a web word processor company called Buzzword.

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The move expands Adobe's collaborative software services and steps up its competition with Microsoft and a host of other Web application providers, including Google. Adobe also is scheduled to announce a service, code-named Share, that allows people to invite others to view and access documents stored by Adobe. Documents can be embedded inside a Web page as well. The service, which is still in testing mode, will offer users one gigabyte of storage for free. Adobe executives are scheduled to detail these initiatives at its Max 2007 developer and designer conference, which starts Monday in Chicago.

Microsoft has announced their Office viewer stuff online. This is rather useless to most people.

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The software maker is announcing Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing--but not editing--Office documents online. (It's existing Office Live efforts will be rebranded as Office Live Small Business.) It's not quite ready--starting Monday customers will be able to put in their name to be part of a beta testing program expected to begin later this year. Still, the effort is a recognition that competition is heating up in the productivity arena, an area that large rivals had basically ceded to Microsoft a few years ago. In addition to Google's effort, which as of earlier this month also includes presentation software, IBM announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability.

The server updates that needed a reboot are now complete. Let me know if anything doesn't work correctly.

And PHP 4 was reinstalled on it. Luckily, I remembered how to install PHP 5 again quickly...

Hopefully everything still works.

I'm going to look into getting another server soon anyway and probably use no control panel. Please let me know if there is any problems.

Someone has been attacking my server using a site called "Gigaloader" which is something to stress test a server. It is also an easy way to do a DoS attack on a server as well.

My network traffic is being slammed right now.

So, if you see traffic like this:
75.185.163.131 - - [27/Sep/2007:05:10:16 -0400] "GET /styles/xanime/top.jpg?2346141190864713656_ANON_DOES_NOT_FORGIVE HTTP/1.1" 200 95852 "http://www.gigaloader.com/user-message/ANON_DOES_NOT_FORGIVE" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7"

Block the ip address and contact your ISP.

There will be a new nuke plant in South Texas soon. This will be the first in 30 years.

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Armed with the backing of the White House and congressional leaders-and subsidies, such as $500 million in risk insurance from the U.S. Department of Energy- the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the U.S. As many as 29 new reactors may be added to the current U.S. fleet of 104, according to Bill Borchardt, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) office of new reactors. "It is going to be significantly different than it was in the 1970s," he says.

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Nintendo Co Ltd roared past Canon Inc to become Japan's second most valuable company behind Toyota Motor Corp, driven by its hot-selling Wii game console and DS handheld player.

Nintendo's Wii has so far outsold Sony's PlayStation 3 by a large margin since their launches late last year as Nintendo's strategy to expand the gaming population by offering easy-to-play but innovative games has proved a big success. Shares in Nintendo were up 2.6 percent at 58,900 yen in afternoon trade on Tuesday, bringing its market value to 8.34 trillion yen ($72.6 billion), surpassing Canon's market capitalization of 8.20 trillion yen.

Linky

All because of two hardware products. I'm sure everyone knew that Nintendo was now rolling in cash. But come on! For an industry where everyone else loses money on hardware sales, this is ridiculous, even if Nintendo has always sold hardware for profit.

ARM makes chips for embedded devices like cell phones and such. Intel wants that business.

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That didn't exactly send shivers down the spine of executives at Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and others that build chips for mobile phones. They've seen this coming for a long time, an inevitable consequence of Intel finding itself with reams of chipmaking capacity and a maturing PC market. And Intel has already tried this once, spending billions trying to develop a combination of chips for the cell phone market but failing miserably. Following Intel's show in San Francisco last week, ARM developers will be meeting next week in Santa Clara, Calif.--Intel's hometown--for its annual developers' conference to discuss new applications and techniques for extracting more performance out of ARM's processor cores. The collective effort of both camps should do wonders to jump-start a market for mobile devices built for real people, not just coffee-toting executives rushing through O'Hare trying to get the 7:42 flight to San Francisco.

If you have an unlocked iPhone, don't update it. You may brick your phone.

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Apple said today that a firmware update to the iPhone due to be released later this week "will likely result" in SIM-unlocked iPhones turning into very expensive bricks. "Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed," said Apple in a statement issued this afternoon.

Halo 3 has been released. How many gamers took the day off today?

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An enormous spotlight beamed up over Fifth Avenue, and full-out lighting and sound equipment--along with plenty of enormous TV screens--dominated the ground scene. A team of Mountain Dew minions were walking around with trays of plastic shot glasses containing a seemingly endless supply of samples of its Halo 3-branded energy drink, "Game Fuel." There was a guy in a Master Chief outfit, of course. Best Buy and Microsoft representatives were giving away T-shirts and other prizes to the fans who were willing to scream the loudest or wave their homemade signs (best one: "MASTER CHIEF IS MY FATHER"). And in addition to the handful of local NFL players, rappers Ludacris and Chingy and R&B singer Bobby Valentino were also on-site to try out the game for the cameras.

It seems that the cofounder of Apple didn't like that the price dropped so quickly on the iPhone. You should have stayed with the company to command it. If not, ohh well.

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Even though he takes issue with the price cut and how it was handled, Wozniak said he is a big fan of the iPhone. "I fell in love with the iPhone," he said. "I did not like it at first." Wozniak said it took him a month to fall in love with the device. He said he also "loves the Blackberry Pearl because it is such a small size. The iPhone is bigger, but boy that iPhone is more fun even when it's slower at dialing phone calls." Wozniak said he still has not switched the phone he primarily uses for voice over to the iPhone because of the "voice quality, being able to hear it." What's more, he said, the iPhone doesn't work with the BlueTooth (wireless hands free) technology he loves so much."I like to be hands free and my voice dialing is not built into the iPhone yet," he says. "I expect that soon."

You fell in love with it, but it doesn't work the way you want too?

Yom Kippur starts tonight. I'll be fasting from sundown to sundown and I'll be very limited on the site at that time (if at all). Easy fast for everyone celebrating.

Microsoft is gambling on its release of Halo 3 next week to cement the Xbox in people's living rooms. I may consider purchasing one if the price drops... a lot. I enjoy the Wii too much.

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There is little doubt the game, which goes on sale at midnight on Tuesday, will be a blockbuster release. Brokerage Wedbush Morgan predicts that Microsoft could sell 3 million copies in the product's first 12 days. The 2004 release of Halo 2 brought in $125 million in its first day, a then-record, Kim said. That's a far cry from the kind of revenue that Windows or Office generates in a quarter, but it's still some serious cash.

Halo 2 become uninteresting when the level of cheat (on a console!) became too prevalent.

A new version of OpenOffice has been released.. Version 2.3 offers more features and better speed.

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Available for download now, OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities. It is a major release and all users should download it.

Plus: It is only with 2.3 that users can make full use of our growing extensions library.

I really wanted to show everyone why blogs should not be used as real news. Here's a good example. News.com starting blogging about a year ago and they used to label the blogs in their RSS feed... not anymore. All of the stories now are pretty much crappy blog stories...

Let's take some content...

Will free office suites supplant Microsoft as the industry leader?

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Quite a bit of talk has arisen today over two of Microsoft's competitors (Google and IBM) offering free office suites in an attempt to supplant Microsoft as the office king. And now that this is happened, some are wondering if Microsoft will finally face reality and offer its own Office product for free so it can compete.

The possibility of having Word, Excel, Powerpoint and the rest for free sure sounds awfully nice, but if you think Microsoft would give it up for free, you're dreaming.

As NPD announced just last week, Office 2007 is performing extremely well. According to the research firm, Office 2007 on Windows is selling at roughly double the rate of Office 2003. Will two free solutions alter the unprecedented sales figures Microsoft is currently enjoying? Not a chance.

So that sounds fairly well off, right? Nope. First of all, Google's so-called office suite is only online and doesn't really compete with MS Office. The second is that IBM isn't offering Open Office... Open Office is open source and 'offered' by Sun! But in reality, it is offered by anyone willing to compile the source.

Let's move on...

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As someone who has used both Google's Office Suite and another free product, OpenOffice, I can say that neither of those programs can possibly stack up to Windows Office. Believe me, I wish I could say that both do, but the sad truth is they don't.

Sorry, most reasonably technical people know the difference between Windows and MS Office. This is where I stopped reading. But I continued again...

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For example, try to do everything you can in Excel on a free Office solution and I'll guarantee you'll be back to Redmond in no time. Regardless of where your loyalties lie, it's impossible to compare these free products with Office -- the support is horrible, the interface is a bit clunky and all of them are underpowered. In fact, OpenOffice is better-equipped to compete with Office 97 than Office 2007.

That's a pretty good lie. OpenOffice Calc does everything that Excel does. I've used it and still do. Calc has different functions and such, but it is feature complete. This is a good example of someone not bothering to learn anything different.

More...

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Sad as it is, we're cultivating an Office software market that is utterly dominated by one company. And whether or not we like it, the business world runs on Office.

Now go pay too much money for a $50 software suite. Trust me, you'll like it.

Most people don't like paying for MS Office and usually get it from someone else. Yes, they perform infringement. If Microsoft clamped down on those, you'll see the free solutions really sky rocket.

The Eclipse project for Java has released a new version for PHP. I'll be download and trying this out tonight. I actually use Kate, but Kate has some stupid bugs such as not indenting stuff when I tell it to do so.

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The PDT project is working towards providing a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass all development components necessary to develop PHP and will facilitate extensibility. It will leverage the existing Web Tools Project in providing developers with PHP capabilities.

Mozilla is trying to make Thunderbird better by doing what it did with Firefox. Thunderbird needs better features and Exchange support. Even though I hate to say the last part... There is really no good app that replaces Outlook.

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The new corporation will draw the two or three dedicated Thunderbird programmers out from under their current Firefox umbrella and hire new staff, Baker said. As with its sister Mozilla Corp., the foundation set up the corporation as a convenient legal mechanism to meet overall Mozilla Foundation goals, not to be a moneymaking business, she added. The dynamic nature of the e-mail business was on display Monday when Yahoo, which operates a leading Web-based e-mail service, spent $350 million to acquire Zimbra, which develops open-source software that gives Web-based e-mail much of the feel of PC-based e-mail software. Zimbra also offers an offline version that lets people read and write e-mail from computers when they're not connected to a network, further blurring the boundaries between Web- and PC-based e-mail software.

Microsoft is once again forced to unbundle WMP from its OS and pay a hefty fine. The appeal can go to one more court before being final.

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"The Court criticises, in particular, the obligation imposed on Microsoft to allow the monitoring trustee, independently of the Commission, access to its information, documents, premises and employees and also to the source code of its relevant products," it said. Microsoft has now been ordered to pay 80% of the Commission's legal costs, while the Commission has to carry a specific part of Microsoft's costs. The Commission welcomed the verdict. It will give its competition commissioner Neelie Kroes a much needed boost, after her office lost several high-profile anti-trust cases. Ms Kroes described the victory as "bittersweet", saying that software customers still have no more choice than they did three years ago.

Intel has made a major acquisition in the gaming tool market. They bought Havok, the company that does physics engines for many, many games.

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Havok most recently announced Havok 5 at the Austin Game Developers Conference, adding "major new features" in this latest edition of its modular suite of run-time technology and artists' tools. As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.

We welcome in the year 5768 tonight. I hope everyone is celebrating with friends and family. Rosh Hashana is the Jewish new year.

NASA has developed Silicon Carbide ICs that can withstand very high heat. The new circuits can be used in high heat environments like jets and such.

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The new silicon carbide differential amplifier integrated circuit chip may provide benefits to anything requiring long-lasting electronic circuits in very hot environments such as jets, spacecraft and industrial machinery. In particular, NASA said SiC applications will include energy storage, renewable energy, nuclear power, electrical drives. The use of the high temperature packaging and operation of SiC power modules for its power electronics equipment will bring about the benefits of increase in power density, reduction in heat sink requirements (thus smaller size and mass), and higher frequency operation that also results in lower mass for the filters and transformers.

Let us all take a brief moment out our day and remember what happened on this day six years ago. We will never forget. I will make sure of that.

Every major news outfit is showing the scene at ground zero today. Very solemn. This year has been the first when the weather isn't sunny and bright. It is also the first year that the memorial isn't being held at the WTC.

Starting Wed night, Jewish people will be welcoming in the year 5768. Happy New Year!

IBM is now backing OpenOffice.org. You can expect code updates from IBM to start flowing soon. They need to fix the speed and the widgets of the app.

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"IBM is very pleased to be joining the OpenOffice.org community. We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world,” said Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM's Lotus division. "We're particularly pleased to be teaming with the community to accelerate the rate of innovation in the office productivity marketplace. We believe that this relationship will improve our ability to deliver innovative value to users of IBM products and services. We also believe that the collaboration will lead to an even broader range of ODF-supporting applications (ISO 26300) and solutions that draw from the OpenOffice.org technology."

Do we need yet another new HD format disk? The new entry will be able to use a red laser to hold 30GB per disk. That's pretty impressive. HD-DVD and Bluray both use blue lasers (which has a shorter wavelength).

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HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second; that's within halfway between HD DVD's 36 mpbs and Blu-ray's 48 mbps. The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future. Levich said the video quality is "at least as good" as that of the other formats. Using a projection system, HD VMD reps showed me clips of "We Were Soldiers" and "Apocalypto." The movies looked very good--not as stunning as I expected, but I'd just arrived from the CEDIA show floor, where every television vendor uses phenomenal, highly doctored content to show off their products.

Apple dropped the price on the iPhone only 2 months after its initial release pissing a lot of people off. But, it's going to make it up to all of the loyal Apple customers who purchased one. These customers are still beat out of $100, but Apple didn't HAVE TO DO anything. Jobs makes some obvious points about the technology market, and still tries to make nicey. This is one of the reasons Apple deserves all of the success it can get.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

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"Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple's website next week. Stay tuned."

I'm glad ATI is addressing this issue. I know that this has been an issue for many of us. This will definitely increase the hardware choices for Linux users.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804673

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"AMD said it had been working with various open source groups to enhance the compatibility for its ATI Radeon graphics chips for consumer Linux users. The releases, which are planned for early September, would also include subsequent versions of ATI's Catalyst developer software package."

Yeah, this was expected... New iPods based on the iPhone's interface have been released. Apple also dropped over 5% yesterday because of price cuts!

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As for the iPod Touch, Apple watchers had speculated for days that Apple would unveil an iPod similar to its new mobile phone. Though slimmer than the iPhone, the iPod Touch features a similar multitouch interface, built-in Wi-Fi and the Safari Internet browser. Like the iPhone, the iPod Touch can play YouTube videos. It will retail for $299 or $399, depending on the memory installed. One thing the iPod Touch can't do that the iPhone can: make or receive phone calls. Jobs said Apple will begin shipping the iPod Touch this month.