The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

IBM advances Linux for Power chips
IBM has put more muscle behind its effort to improve Linux for its Power family of processors, adding dozens of programmers to Big Blue's Linux Technology Center with plans to hire more. "We hadn't been doing enough to fully enable Linux" on Power processors, the chip line used in IBM's pSeries Unix servers and its iSeries of midrange servers, said Dan Frye, director of the Linux Technology Center. "Linux runs pretty well today on Power. We want to take it from pretty good to world class." The number of programmers at IBM's Linux Technology Center rose from about 250 to more than 300 as a result of the shift, Frye said. The new programmers at the center had already been working on "Linux on Power" elsewhere in the company, but IBM also will hire more developers for the task, Frye said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1025693.html?tag=fd_top

RIAA threat may be slowing file swapping
The record industry's plan to sue individuals who trade songs online has caused a precipitous drop in the use of file-swapping applications, according to one Internet ratings service. Nielsen / Netratings, a company that monitors Web traffic and desktop application use, said that use of top file-trading applications such as Kazaa and Morpheus have fallen by about 15 percent since the end of June. On June 25, the Recording Industry Association of America announced it was planning to file what could be thousands of lawsuits against individuals who trade copyrighted music online. "I would definitely say it's not a coincidence that the numbers fell that far," said Greg Bloom, senior analyst with Nielsen/Netratings. "A drop this significant probably has some kind of external cause."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-1025684.html?tag=fd_top

Torvalds test-drives new Linux core
Linux development leader Linus Torvalds on Monday released a test version of the next heart of the Linux operating system, version 2.6. Even though it's still a test kernel, calling it "2.6" is a signal for programmers to get down to work testing and stamping out bugs rather than experimenting with new ideas, Torvalds said in a posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "The point of the test versions is to make more people realize that they need testing and get some straggling developers realizing that it's too late to worry about the next big feature," Torvalds said. Two weeks ago, Torvalds forecasted the 2.6 test versions -- somewhat later than hoped -- and last week released the last member of the 2.5 development lineage.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1025610.html?tag=fd_top

AOL and TiVo unite on remote programming
America Online and digital video recorder (DVR) maker TiVo detailed a new partnership under which TiVo users can program their machines remotely via AOL's online network. To take advantage of the offer, users must subscribe to both AOL and TiVo's existing online services. TiVo's DVR service enables consumers to pause live television shows and to program their recorders to store future shows. Consumer electronics companies such as Pioneer Electronics, Sony Electronics and Toshiba have licensing agreements with TiVo to use its service in their products. AOL is one of the original investors in TiVo. The partnership is an example of increased efforts by electronics manufacturers to build networking capabilities into new products.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-1025562.html?tag=fd_top

What's holding back online music?
How do you sell snow on the North Pole? That's the type of problem confronting music companies that want college students and other Internet users to pay to download music instead of swap it for free. If music is available for nothing, why pay? The music industry believes that it loses $3.5 billion a year to pirating through sites like the now-shuttered Napster and its successors, such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. Music sales have fallen 25 percent since Napster was launched four years ago, and the industry has had three responses: erecting technological barriers to downloading; filing lawsuits against downloaders and their enablers; and creating legal, alternative sites that charge downloading fees that flow to record companies and artists. But according to Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, who studies online businesses, another promising approach is getting too little attention.
http://news.com.com/2030-1086_3-1025006.html

Inside the open-source development model
Programmers contribute to free software and open-source projects for many reasons--some for the fun of it, some to improve their skills and others for a paycheck. Many people have wondered why these people give their work away. The truth is that many projects have become incorporated in order to protect themselves from individual liability. Since the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, a number of new nonprofit foundations have formed, often around specific technologies, to serve the interests of programmers. Harvard Business School professor Siobhan O'Mahony discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source Web server.
http://news.com.com/2009-1087_3-1024609.html

The politics of open-source software
Mike Wendy says he doesn't hate open-source software. Wendy, spokesman and policy counsel for the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), says he just wants to make sure government agencies don't unduly favor open-source or free programs over proprietary software. "We want a process that is not based on automatic preferences," Wendy said. The ISC is by far the most vocal opponent of a growing trend: Legislation that, if enacted, would all but prohibit government agencies from purchasing proprietary software for their own use. The ISC asserts that such legislation could jeopardize the future of the worldwide commercial software industry. Because of the size of governments' ever-growing information technology budgets, billions of dollars are at stake.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1025...ml?tag=fd_nc_1

MP3 creator speaks out
The term MP3 is well-known to millions of the world's teenagers but its mere mention sends shivers down the spines of record industry executives. The format responsible for a musical revolution allows you to compress sound into a file which is a fraction of the size of the original. But a name which will be unfamiliar to many is that of Karlheinz Brandenburg - the German researcher who was one of the inventors of MP3. He first began working on a way of making small sound files some 20 years ago as part of the doctorate thesis. "We had dreams from the start," he told BBC World's ClickOnline. But he never expected his work to achieve the popularity or notoriety it has. "In 1988 somebody asked me what will become of this, and I said it could just end up in libraries like so many other PhD theses," he recalls. "But it could become something that millions of people will use, that was the dream."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3059775.stm

Spanish Shawn Fanning is hot
Pablo Soto has been hailed as the Spanish Shawn Fanning: a 23-year-old kid with a knack for coding, a passion for music and a certain brashness in his willingness to take on the record industry. At least for now, Soto is better known in Europe, where two file-swapping services, Blubster and Piolet, are powered by the MP2P software he created. But he may gain a higher profile in the United States if established services, such as Grokster and iMesh, adopt his unique version of peer-to-peer software.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...al/6299169.htm

Machine vs. Man: Checkmate
Garry Kasparov’s head is bowed, buried in his hands. Is he in despair, or just stealing a minute of rest in his relentless quest to regain the world championship, promote chess and represent humanity in the epic conflict between man and machine? He professes the latter. But no one could blame the greatest grandmaster in history if he did succumb to bleakness. His own experiences indicate the end of the line for human mastery of the chessboard. In the sport of brains, silicon rules. Still, Kasparov is preparing to throw himself into the breach once more. In November he will play his third computer opponent in a highly touted match. The first, of course, was IBM’s Deep Blue, which in 1997 beat him in a battle that he insists to this day was unfairly stacked against him.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/938172.asp

This movie will self-destruct
Every time Jim Phelps, the leader of the “Mission: Impossible” team, picked up pre-recorded details of his latest assignment, he was told: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” And lo-and-behold, with a puff of smoke, the tape turned to cinders. In August, fact will follow fiction with the arrival of the first real-life self-destructing recording medium. This has been made possible by tinkering with the molecular structure of a plastic that is even older than the television series. Since 1966, when the first “Mission: Impossible” was broadcast, tapes have become old hat. The medium du jour is the DVD, and it is a self-destructing DVD that Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of Disney, plans to test-market in America next month. This DVD, known as EZ-D to its makers, Flexplay Technologies, of New York, can be played for 48 hours after being removed from its cover. It will then self-destruct — not in flames, its inventors hasten to add, but because contact with the air eventually renders its surface opaque, making it impossible for the laser in a disc player to read the data beneath.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1907716

Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates
JC, a 36-year-old Harry Potter fan in Kansas City, Mo., decided he was too old to go chasing after the fifth book in the popular series when it came out last month. Instead, he downloaded the book, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" from the Internet, conveniently avoiding both bookstore crowds and the $29.99 cover price. "I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better," said JC, who insisted on being identified only by the online nickname because he thinks that what he did was illegal. He said he still intended to buy the book to read to his 8-year-old son. So far, authors and publishers have mainly stood on the sidelines of the Internet file-swapping frenzy that has shaken the music industry and aroused fear among makers of motion pictures. But the publishing phenomenon around the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital copyright wars: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/14/te...partne r=CNET

AOL ends CD, DVD link to Amazon
America Online said on Friday that it is now selling DVDs and CDs directly as part of its push into digital music, ending a temporary link it had with Amazon.com until it was able to do so itself.
An AOL spokeswoman said the Internet division of AOL Time Warner had been using Amazon on an interim basis to sell CDs and DVDs. She added that its pacts with the online retailer are still ongoing. Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said that AOL's links to Amazon were formerly links that existed between AOL and CDNow, which now uses Amazon's e-commerce technology to sell music and DVDs. The CDNow brand and site belong to German media group Bertelsmann. "Our strategic relationship with AOL is longstanding, multifaceted and ongoing," Curry said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1019_3-1025423.html?tag=cd_mh

Funding for TIA All But Dead
The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation. The Senate's $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness. TIA's projected budget for 2004 is $169 million. TIA is the brainchild of John Poindexter, a key figure from the Iran-Contra scandal, who now heads the research effort at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html

Wind Powers Brit Energy and Jobs
Britain is pushing ahead with a huge expansion of offshore wind farms which could supply green power to more than 3 million households and create 20,000 new jobs, the government said Monday. The government is inviting companies to bid to build new farms, some of which are likely to be 10 times the size of the first scheme under construction in Wales, Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade an Industry said. "The first wind farm has 30 turbines. Developers are saying they want to build much, much larger offshore wind farms -- up to 300 turbines," Hewitt told the BBC. The program could involve an investment of 6 billion pounds ($9.76 billion) and add 6,000 megawatts of generation capacity.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,59621,00.html

Germans Just Wild About Harry
Harry Potter mania may mutate into new forms -- at least if the German response is any guide. The latest volume of the J.K. Rowling saga, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has stirred much interest in Germany. It has sold more than 500,000 copies, becoming the first English-language book ever to top the German best-seller lists. But Rowling's imaginative universe has also moved a group to form an online community devoted to bringing the book alive in German translation. More than 10,000 people, with an average age of 16, have joined the virtual community at the Harry-auf-Deutsch website.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59609,00.html

The End of Cancer (As we Know it)
When Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, he had no way of knowing that the fight would turn into medicine's own Vietnam. At the time, cancer seemed like a relatively simple disease. Something in the body was triggering cells to divide abnormally fast; find that mechanism and shut it off, and you'd have a cure. It seemed reasonable enough, but like Agent Smith in The Matrix, cancer turned out to be a malignant rogue with an uncanny ability to survive. It could be burned, poisoned, and eviscerated beyond recognition - only to pop up again somewhere nearby. It could also copy itself at will. In the decades since, scientists have managed to identify a handful of genes that seem to have mutated in cancer patients, but in each case their research led to a paradox. The same genes that triggered the production of cancerous cells also controlled vital life processes.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/cancer.html

Sun Revealed as SCO's Secret Licensee
In an agreement signed in February but only revealed this week, Sun Microsystems has signed a deal to license SCO Group's Unix intellectual property. SCO, which has had limited revenue from sales of Unix software and has stopped its Linux sales, relies on its intellectual property licensing division for revenue. When Microsoft announced that it would license SCO's Unix in May, it looked to be this year's first big win for SCO's licensing strategy. But with the confirmation of the Sun deal, it is now clear the Sun-SCO agreement preceded the Microsoft-SCO licensing agreement by three months. Furthermore, the agreement with Sun "puts to rest who really owns Unix source code," SCO spokesperson Blake Stowell told NewsFactor, referring to Novell's short-lived claim that it owned the Unix copyright. "If that were the case, then certainly SCO would be in no position to further license any type of Unix source code."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21894.html

Bits and Bytes May Encode Nature's Secrets
Atoms, quarks and strings, step aside. Ultra-small packets of pure information -- "nature's bits" -- may be the basic building blocks of the natural world, says a group of physics researchers that includes Danish Nobel Laureate Gerard t'Hooft. "Space-time geometry and the distribution of matter in it arise from pure, underlying information," explained physicist Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Information specifies the when, where, why, how and how much of space, time and matter. Information describes everything -- and may be the variable of choice for a "theory of everything," Bousso and his colleagues maintain.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21883.html

Researchers try to clean nuclear sites with microbes
Scientists are experimenting with some unusual species of bacteria that can thrive by cleaning up radioactive wastes left over from the Cold War when nuclear weapons plants across the country were running full blast. The problem exists wherever uranium has been mined, processed and made into nuclear bombs. Almost 500 billion gallons of groundwater -- enough to supply 1. 5 million homes for a year -- remain contaminated with uranium and other toxic chemicals in 36 states, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates. Now researchers are starting to exploit that ability as a way to clean up nuclear sites, a process called "bioremediation."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...4/MN103893.DTL

Bertelsmann seeks dismissal of $17bn Napster suit
Bertelsmann is going to court in New York on Thursday to seek the dismissal of a $17 billion lawsuit filed against it because it financed Napster. The German media giant is to argue that it has infringed no copyright in its role as a third-party funder of the defunct P2P file-trading software biz, according to Spiegel, which has seen a copy of its 50-page submission. Bertelsmann also claims that Universal Music, one of the plaintiffs, had also tried to buy Napster. The deal fell through when Napster's price got too high.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/31725.html

[multi]

had fun going thru all thst ..good stuff

thanks for leaving it in here a little longer than usual..

[MRON]

Thanks, WT!


15% percent drop in filesharers, eh?

RIAA : "it's working!"

no chance they went elsewhere to share, hmmm!

so shortsighted, that industry is