Steve Jobs Clip From Revenge of the Nerds Exposes Steve Jobs for the Hypocrite He is!

Steve Jobs: "And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

If this is so Steve, why do you whine about Redmond stealing ideas from you? I still fail to understand why people admire you. Sorry if that seems opinionated or in poor taste and sorry if that seems like I’m just some punk but I think you were born with the ability to inspire people and instead you threw it away when you choose to be a hypocrite.

Konfabulator anyone? Mac fanatics, please keep in mind that if Bill Gates was on record or any other top brass at Redmond contradicting themselves this bad and being shameless about it, I would feel the same way towards them. I can’t believe I didn’t see this clip, I know I’ve seen Revenge of the Nerds.

The thing we all need to get over is the fact that in the technology world, folks are expected to base their own technology of the work of others to some extent, the same kudos are not handed out in the technology world for originality as they are in the realms of art. In technology you must use patents to you advantage, and there is a difference between a patent troll and someone who legitimately tried to start something and had less capital.

Robert Cringley speculates that there may be someone trying to hide this clip because of the patent infringement lawsuit against Apple from a company called Burst.

Mr. Squidoo is on the side of Burst.com in this dispute. He’s apparently a Burst investor and a member of the very active Yahoo Group of Burst investors and those interested in the company.

The video clips Squidoo posted to YouTube are probably among those Steve Jobs would like to forget, especially as the CEO of a company charged with patent infringement. Since the clips were challenged and withdrawn, I can’t point you to them, but I CAN share with you the money quote, courtesy of the "Triumph of the Nerds" transcript available all along right here on PBS.org:

The kicker is the fact that the clips were taken down by a company called NBD Television Ltd. and they don’t even own the copyright, and thus have committed perjury perhaps if they stated they were the owners. There are many other clips from the same show which are even longer (less likely to be fair use) than the few taken down. I think the DMCA needs to be redrafted with stricter penalties for people who lie stating they own the copyright. It could be something they owned in the clip that we don’t know about yet, or perhaps they had a person in the company who was a rabid Apple fanatic who sometimes try to hide the faults of Steve Jobs more than Steve Jobs himself. Great stuff!

Technorati tags: Patent, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Lawsuit, Technology Lawsuit, Steve Jobs, Rober Cringely, I Cringely, Hypocrite, Apple, Revenge of the nerds, Mr. Squidoo, Burst vs. Apple, Mac Fanatic, Rabid Mac Fans, Invent, Invest, Burst.com

RIAA Lawsuit Decision Matrix Document (Makes Me Sick)

This document obtained by BBspot makes me feel sick. It TRULY does show how low this scum of the earth RIAA company really is. Pray on the elderly. Wow, this shocked me even for a company as low as the RIAA. I truly wish it wasn’t real but the more I read about it the sicker I get. I don’t normally blog or read much headlines at work but I had to stop and re-post this so that more people saw it. I don’t think I’ll ever buy another record in my life.

 

Microsoft Unveils it’s Xbox 360 Elite Console

After much (planted most likely by marketing deparment) speculation, Microsoft today unveiled it’s much anticipated HDMI enabled Xbox 360. HDMI doesn’t have any improvements over DVI + Digital Audio besides the ability to harbor DRM content protection. I don’t think Microsoft will black out the users who–like myself–own an older premium (or core) box but I’ve seen crazier things happen.

Along with the new box, Microsoft will make available the 120 gig hard drive. This is the single most important feature. I beleive that the current hard drive has been serverely holding back Xbox Live Sales of digital content. Myself, I am always killing myself over which file I should delete and whether the new content is worth downloading or not. The Xbox 360, especially when combined with a Vista MCE with Cablecard or Direct TV Card (Direct TV is supposed to be available in Vista in the early part of this fall from sources I know) represents the most powerful, useful, and entertaining machine you can hook to a High Definition TV.

The Elite console will also come with other items which are already available on the market including a wireless controller (albeit black) with a charge kit and battery. The new box has a very smooth black finish.

Related: Microsoft Press Release

Technorati tags: xbox 360, xbox, xbox live, microsoft, extender 2.0, entertainment, console, home technology, xbox 360 elite, black xbox, hdmi

Apple’s Headed to the Enterprise with Leopard Server OS 10.5

John C. Welch is one of those guys that for the most part can sit down and have a reasonable conversation about Apple. He’s got a wonderful overview of Apple’s up and coming along server product. I like the statement he makes here: 

Apple is taking items that either cost a lot of money, or need a lot of expertise, and selling them real cheap, and in a way that while you still need some basic networking knowledge and skills to set up, won’t require the same levels as other systems.

This is exactly what Apple is going to have to do! Let’s see they are making it Simple and Cost Effective. Apple doesn’t have a brand that is very appealing to today’s enterprise primarily because even if they have cost effective offerings, their name brand gives the impression that you are paying a premium, and there are not a slew of Admins and Engineers with an OSX background to choose from. Regardless, Apple will sell a lot of these by taking expensive enterprise features and putting them in the grasp of small to medium sized business CIO’s who don’t have Linux Admins around.

If you don’t know much about Apple’s server here’s the low down.

• XNU Kernel – At it’s core, Apple Server OS is based on the XNU kernel that Steve Jobs and NeXT developed for the NEXTSTEP operating system. This kernel is a hybrid of the Mach kernel which was developed at the Carnegie Mellon University and BSD 4.3’s Object oriented API Driver kit. While a Micro-kernel, XNU also contains advantages (and disadvantages) seen in Monolithic kernels.
• OSS Components
• Apache – Perhaps the most known and loved web server, Apache runs on any major OS.
• Samba – Very popular File and Print server which can also act as a Domain Controller. First appeared in Apple’s 10.2 client. Open source alternative to SMB which stands for Server message Block.
• OpenLDAP – OSS variety of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Microsoft’s LDAP software is known as Active Directory which most enterprises have built their infrastructure on. OpenLDAP is the foundation for many great OSS products like Zimbra.
• Kerberos – Kerberos is a very widely utilized computer network authentication protocol in today’s enterprise. It’s widely deployed on many internal assets such as intranet sites. Very important protocol which allows cross domain authentication without having to sign into various assets. (Single Sign on) The default Authentication Protocol on Windows 2000 and later.
• Postfix – A very popular open source MTA (Mail Transfer Agent). I’ve heard many an argument over whether Postfix or Sendmail was the better choice.
• Jabber – A popular Open source instant Messaging and Presence information service. (IM and buddy list)  Recently became even more popular when Google announced they would be basing their Gtalk service on Jabber.
• SpamAssassin – essential for any mailserver, SpamAssassin is an email spam filtering software written in perl. SpamAssassin is used in many commercial offerings like McAfee’s SpamKiller.  
• iCal Server – A first for Mac OS X Server. Using the iCal Server Mac Users can now share calendars using open standards and without any Microsoft software. Ability to search appointments and attendee availability ship with this first iteration of iCal and you can also book rooms and other resources such as projectors and conference bridges. iCal server lets you attach agendas and to-do lists to appointments which help with project management collaboration. As John Welch points out, this was a big hole in Apple’s Server offering.
• Availability and Scalability via Xsan Clustering: In today’s raised floor environments the ability to cluster in 64-bit environments is a must. Many services running on your Leopard server will be able to send assignments out around the X-Grid which helps get things done much faster.
• Wiki Server: Apple has joined the Wiki-revolution. They really are trying to eliminate the need to run exchange and are making progress by providing applications that folks are familiar with like Wiki Server and delivering a usability level that will most likely be polished to a level of sheen on seen accompanied by the Apple Logo. Shared Calendaring, Mailing Lists, Blog for Communication, Podcasting, Customized Web Workspaces (Sounds like A Redmond word) are all touted as features on the first Apple Wiki Server. This is a great use for Podcasting, I only wonder if Podcast Producer works Dynamically and seamlessly with the Wiki Server, or whether the Admins simply have to drop the Podcast into the wiki server manually.
• Spotlight Server: Spotlight server is an indexing daemon that works with OSX’s Spotlight client and let’s users instantly search network volumes. It scans the permissions of files so that it only delivers results from files that users have access to. No word on whether you need to be running OpenLDAP or whether this feature works with Active Directory. No word on whether this benefits Windows users (web page to search?) that I’ve seen.
• Podcast Producer: From Video Capture, Encode, Edit, to Deliver and Syndicate, Podcast producer takes the producer out of podcasts! Works with Open Directory to lock down controls on who can do which actions using the server. Not sure how well it works in an active directory environment, I assume you can do without single signon and create userid’s for folks who will be using this feature.
• iChat Server 2: iChat 2 brings stated improvements to multi-user chat, file transfers, audio and video conferencing and also screensharing. The big improvement is that they have joined iChat into the XMPP instant messaging federation so that user can chat with fols on Google Talk and many (millions) of other mostly open source project sites. From a governance point of view, I am sure this can be disabled in the enterprise. most companies have to worry about SOX compliance and chatting around the world won’t do them much good unless they are storing every single chat taking place. Also, there is a productivity gain or loss to be considered.
• Xgrid 2: Xgrid 2 is a scoreboard for prioritizing the many compute costly jobs that are running on the Clustered environment.
• Open Directory 4: Now includes cross-domain authorization (Hey, you copied off of Kerberos!! 🙂 ) cascading replication and RADIUS which is for your AirPort based wireless networks.
• Web Goodness: Administration for in no particular order: Apache 2.2 and/or 1.3, MySQL 5 with Apache/MySQL/PHP integration, JBoss 4, Tomcat 5, and Ruby on Rails with Mongrel.
• 64-bit Computing: Still a perfect host for 32-bit applications and the following applications get delivered in 64-bit flavors:
• Apache 2
• MySQL 5
• Postfix
• Cyrus
• iChat Server 2
• QuickTime Streaming Server 6

Overall I think Apple is actually starting to take enterprise sales a bit more seriously. With the success of the iPod, they are a large chunk of change to throw into the R&D departments again and they are taking the best bits from the opensource world combining it into a fairly straitforward package with nice icons 🙂 that doesn’t take a genius the deploy and support.

 

Technorati tags: Apple, Leopard Server OS, OSX, OSX Server, John Welch, XNU Kernel, OSS, OSS Components, Apache, OpenLDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos, Postfix, Jabber, SpamAssassin, iCal Server, Xsan, Xsan Clustering, Apple Wiki Server, Spotlight Server, Podcast Server, Podcast Server 2, iChat Server, iChat Server 2, Xgrid, Xgrid 2, 64-bit, Quicktime Streaming Server, Linux, Mach Kernel, Open Directory, Open Directory 4

Yahoo! Mail now offers Unlimitted Storage for Free

This is just what the people asked for, and Yahoo! Mail has delivered! Now if they could just open up POP and IMAP access to their services I would use them more. Yahoo! Mail has raised the bar quite a few times and they have a very loyal following. Yahoo is close to hitting it’s 10th birthday! That’s great! Yahoo has come a long way in 10 years.

 

Technorati tags: Yahoo Mail, Yahoo!, Yahoo, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Email, Web 2.0, Online Storage, Unlimited Email Storage

Paul Thurrott Correctly Reports on Apple TV being a Bunch of Hype and not much else.

I was a bit late to read this article from Paul Thurrott on Apple TV. Paul is one of those journalists whom in my opinion call the shots as he sees them. The sheer amount of mis-reporting going on in journalism on the Mac experience makes me feel sick. These are paid reporters and editors who repeat garbage like, Microsoft copied Apple and report this as actual news. Paul, like myself can appreciate how great an iPod is: how it works like it should, how it just is the natural evolution of the Walkman.

He also can recognize the difference between a solid product and an over-hyped piece of garbage that Apple TV is. The technology which is being copied from Microsoft (companies have to do this to stay competitive in case a few of you artsy folks didn’t notice–the same kudos for originality are not handed out outside the art and music realms) that was in living rooms a half a decade ago, and reporters who claimed "Apple Pro Performa’s rock!" are now claiming that Apple TV represents a revolution in the living room. This is nothing short of a deliberate bias infected lie by an army of Google News "Copy and pasters" who call them selves journalists.

The low down from Paul Thorrott:

The Apple TV is a typical Apple product: It’s big on hype but short on functionality. It surrenders usability for design, and comes in the smallest form factor possible. It’s tied to Apple’s other products in a way that is arguably anticompetitive, though fans of Apple’s services and devices should have no issues with that. Ultimately, as a gadget guy of sorts, I like the Apple TV for what it does, but given my several years of experience with the Xbox 360, various Media Center PCs and Extenders, TiVo, and other devices, I can also see its limitations and understand that Apple has ultimately under-delivered here. Sure, the Apple TV is cute. But unless you’re in the company’s back pocket, you can easily see that Apple designed this thing primarily for Apple, and not for users. I’m a huge fan and regular user of iTunes and various iPods, but the Apple TV is lacking that special something that those solutions have in spades. It is neither best of breed nor even in the running. It is, in short, simply OK. And I know Apple can do better than this.

John Molloy of ZDNet says Paul does his usual hack job on Apple products even though the last five products reviews Paul’s given on Apple products have been given from 4 out of 5, to 5 out of 5 Stars, and he has been eagerly waiting the delayed overhpyed machine since it was announced.

I can’t believe someone like John Molloy doesn’t even understand how the Media Center experience works in the living room. He thought it needed a hard drive what a dope! What I’ve been saying for a long time is that Apple TV stands ZERO chance! All of the developers that are working on MCE experiences stack up way beyond what Apple TV has even begun to imagine. Why? Because not only are Apple Employees too stuck up to show up at conferences like CES, they shun the CEDIA crowd. Without getting into too many specifics just take a second to go over to www.thegreenbutton.com or just check out life|ware from Exceptional Innovation. There are a million startups out there that are partnering with Microsoft and unlike in the portable audio market these guys are light years away from anything Apple has even begun to do.

I’m sorry but it’s going to take more than Apple to bring down these partnerships. We are talking partners with hardware compatibility from companies like Denon, Marantz, Nuvo, Russound, Sony, Channel Vision Panasonic, Lutron, CentralLite, On-Q, SmartHome, DSC, Honeywell, GE. The list goes on. Is Apple going to start producing Power Amps and Pre Amps that sound better than Marantz? Does the Apple Boom box sound better than speakers from Mcintosh? I don’t want a proprietary Apple system. I want on well thought out, original home entertainment system, automation system, sound system, theater room that works together as one cohesive system. I want all of these systems to work together to be INGETRATED!!–A word Apple has never understood since the inception of the company. I’ll stick with my Media Centers and Extenders but thanks.

 

Technorati tags: Apple, Apple TV, Paul Thurrott, Windows MCE, MCE, Media Center, Xbox 360, Xbox, Automation, Media, Home Entertainment, Exceptional Innovation, Windows, Microsoft

Zimbra Desktop Launches

This is great news! I’ve been a big fan of Zimbra email for quite some time. If there is anyone who will free us from Outlook (not that I’m not a fan of Outlook 2007) it’s Zimbra. Scribe is nice, but I like Zimbra much more from what I’ve seen. If you take away the need to scale in the Enterprise, this open source software solution simply blows Exchange’s OWA (Outlook Web Access) out of the water. With the new Zimbra Desktop client Alpha launching, you’ll be given the equivalent of Outlook Cached mode via a web browser. Which means you can basically catch up and respond to email without a connection. There are so many features that baked with Web 2.0 goodness (for lack of a better term) and the only thing that is a minus is the suite is a bit slower than you would like.

To run, all you need is an extra PC laying around the house in which to run a server. Just load it up with your favorite distro of Linux. I’d recommend OpenSuse 10.2. Just make sure you do a minimal install without Gnome or KDE.

To those of you who don’t know much about Zimbra, I’ll give you a list of reasons why you might want to check it out.

1. Opensource: Zimbra has an Open source version which is feature packed, albeit unsupported. If you are a techy running a small business this might be the version for you, although I think it’s only 30 bucks a person a year for the next step up, Zimbra Network edition.

2. SIS: Zimbra utilizes something called Single Instance Storage. Let’s say you have a company with 100 employees each with their own email address on your server. If each of your employees receive the same email with a large attachment this attachment, and the data in the email itself is only stored once on your email server. With Exchange (2003, 2007 has SIS I think), if you receive an email that is a meg, and the email goes to 100 employees, that is taking up 100 megs of storage on your server, no so with Zimbra.

3. Ease of installation:  Installing Zimbra is as simple as running a wizard, and setting up a few MX records on the Internet.

4. Ease of Administration: The Zimbra admin portal is as easy to administrate as using Active Directory Users and Computers with the ESM snap in. Error logging and server statistics are all baked into a centralized AJAX portal making your admin’s day go by smooth.

5. Ajax Goodness – The features which are baked in, and especially those which you can easily install as add-ons (Zimlets) are just fantastic. If you receive a tracking number via email, just right click on it and you get a DHTML layer that pops up with the tracking status pulled directly from the right URL in the same window. If you get an address sent to you, right click to have it instantly appear in Yahoo! Maps beta. If you get a phone number sent to you, right click and call from your favorite VOIP client. Search for a flight, hotel or car with the Travel Agent Zimlet. Also, you can integrate all kinds of other useful and semi useful features such as a wikipedia search box and many more

6. Developers – This suite has almost hit critical mass as far as having an unsurpassed devoted developer support infrastructure. Open Exchange is the Opensource server of yesterday.

7. Themable – I could go on…

Check it out for yourself – www.zimbra.com

Technorati tags: Email, Web 2.0, Zimbra, Outlook, Exchange, Zimlets, Zimbra Desktop, Linux, Opensource, Ajax

Viacom Sues YouTube For a Billion

  http://www.Viacom.com/view_release.jhtml?inID=10000040&inReleaseID=227614

NEW YORK, March 13, 2007 – Viacom Inc. (NYSE:  VIA and VIA.B) today announced that it has sued YouTube and Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties.  The suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.  The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.   

In connection with the filing, Viacom released the following statement:

“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.  Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.  In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.

This won’t fly for a billion, Google has complied according to the DMCA, they can change the DMCA, but Google should only be liable for upholding the law as is. Now, do I think they can do more to prevent infringement? Of course. Interesting where this will lead. Viacom thinks others should have to invest their money to protect their works, that’s what I don’t agree with. Google has to pay to protect it’s own work, other companies have to invest to protect their own work. I guess it’s not the best point I’ve made but I guess it wouldn’t hurt these companies to deal with it like everyone else has to deal with protecting their own works. They sent one DMCA, much of it bogus hurting innocent works that were put online and now they are too good to abide by the standard that all other companies have to deal with. It will be interesting as this lawsuit could totally change the landscape online.

Technorati tags: YouTube, Google, Viacom, Video, MTV, Lawsuit, Law

OpenSuse 10.3 Hits Alpha 1

 

Fresh from the late is better than never department, the Linux distro that is defining Linux on the desktop–OpenSuse–has 10.3 Alpha 1 posted. I saw this a while back and I forgot to write about it. With a new alpha promised every four weeks I think we should see Alpha 2 coming down soon. Before that happens, I wanted to discuss the changes since one of the best distros 10.2.  

There is a new kernel 2.6.20 which is a bit buggy with the rest of the distro as it was only released on 02-04-07 (Superbowl Sunday). The newer kernel provides Sony PS3 Support and a bunch of virtualization technology enhancements. Also a newer X.org which is welcome as Nvidia has been started targeting driver support to these newer X.org builds.

Compiz has been bumped to .3.7 it seems. Patterns, which are layers of software that are prepackaged for certain scenarios are still being improved  and reworked, and Gnome was moved to the user directory. (nice) More below, if you are interested in downloading I pasted in some links.

 

Full Details

• Linux kernel 2.6.20 (no Xen support enabled for now)
• X.org 7.2rc3
• autoconf 2.61
• bash 3.2
• gcc 4.1.3 SVN
• gdb 6.6
• GNOME has been moved to /usr prefix
• more packages have been moved out of /usr/X11R6 prefix
• mDNSresponder has been replaced with avahi
• new pattern for a minimal base installation
• all packages now built with -fstack-protector to better guard against some buffer overflows
• Lessons for Lizards community documentation book
• usage of LUKS by default for crypto partitions in YaST. Both GNOME and KDE handle removable LUKS media now.

Application Updates (Since 10.2)

Beagle
0.2.16
download
desktop search daemon

Compiz
0.3.7
download
3D effects compositing window manager

Digikam
0.9
download
photo management

F-Spot
0.3.1
download
photo management

KDE
3.5.6
download
desktop environment

KDevelop
3.4
download
integrated development environment

Kontact
1.2.4
download
KDE personal information manager and groupware client with support for GroupWise, SLOX, Open-Exchange, Kolab, OpenGroupware, MS Exchange, eGroupware and others

KOffice
1.6.1
download
the most comprehensive office suite in existence

Mono
1.2.2
Mono runtime and software development kit

Frozen Bubble
2.1
download
ever popular game

Mediawiki
1.9.0
web-based collaborative editing environment

ndiswrapper
1.34
use Windows compatible binary wireless network drivers

OpenOffice.org
2.1
office suite, using OASIS file format, with KDE/GNOME integration

Qt
4.2.2
download
C++ application framework for writing applications

Wine
0.9.30
download
compatibility layer for running MS Windows programs

Xfce
4.4
download
desktop environment

Delta ISOs

Downloads
openSUSE Distribution Delta ISO from openSUSE 10.2 GM to openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1

x86
CD1
CD2
CD3
CD4
CD5
BitTorrent
DVD BitTorrent

x86-64
CD1
CD2
CD3
CD4
CD5
BitTorrent
DVD BitTorrent

ppc
CD1
CD2
CD3
CD4
CD5
BitTorrent
DVD BitTorrent

Checksums
MD5SUMS

Technorati tags: Linux, OpenSuse, OpenSuse 10.3, OpenSuse Alpha, Development, Compiz, X.org, Gnome, Open Source, GNU Linux, Novel Factory

Google Phone Rumors

Wow, this could be sweet. Don’t fret WM5 and 6 owners, competition is good!!!

 

From: http://simeons.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/the-real-google-phone/

 

The most interesting aspect is the go-to-market strategy. Apparently, Google is planning to build distribution relationships with multiple carriers by allowing them to minimize subscription and marketing costs. In other words, Google will market the phone online and carriers will fulfill. How fast can you say dumb pipe?