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Friday, June 20, 2003 |
Wi-fi will be 'next dot.com crash'. Hopes of a profit bonanza from setting up wireless broadband networks will be dashed, a technology consultancy warns. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
I was talking about this with a friend the other day. There are several coincidences between Wi-Fi and dot com. Both involve useful technology (802.11 and the internet), both are very good and make sense to consumers, but there is no business case behind most of the propositions. Yes, if you have a small cafe and an office in the back with an internet connection, you can share it with patrons and get more and better business, but the big, national hot spots do not sound feasible at this time.
2:26:45 PM 
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SCO: Darl-ing for dollars. CNET ; Michael Kanellos says open-source folks aren't tackling the one key question in the SCO Group-IBM hoo-ha over Unix: What if the company's right? [CNET News.com]
This article is so stupid and has so many mistakes it's hard to even start to criticize it. Lets start here: For all the pleadings and letters that will emerge from this maelstrom, SCO's claims are fairly simple: It owns the bulk of the intellectual property underlying Unix, and recently, some of its code has been spied in Linux. Actually, make that quite a bit of it, says SCO.
Nope. It's not that simple. Assume the same code has been found in Unix and Linux (something that has not been demonstrated yet). Next you have to find out where the code came from. It could be from BSD (heck, it could have been written by Bill Joy himself, his code has been found in the most unlikely places including Windows). If you manage to prove that the code belongs to SCO, then you have to see who put it in Linux. It is truly infantile to believe that IBM has been so careless as to put Unix code in Linux, leave proof that it did, and then dismiss the threat of a lawsuit. Who do you think IBM is? Do you really think they do not understand IP laws? Buy a brain somewhere!
We can continue here:
Extracting the controversial code is not really a feasible solution. Because of the way intellectual property (IP) laws work, derivative products that use the allegedly pilfered code are also subject to liability. Anyone who bundles suspect products, or uses them, is also conceivably on the hook.
This statement is false. IP property does not contaminate anything it touches (the GPL does). First, you would have to show that Linux is a derivative work, which depends on which is the first version with the tainted code (which we still don't know is there). Second, you can not attack existing copies bought in good faith. Imagine that you bought a book that later is found out to have whole chapters plagiarized from another. The real author can sue the publishing company and get compensation (of course), but do you really think you are liable? Do you even think there will be a court order to destroy every single copy of the book? Do you know one case like that?
News.com has been pushing up SCO claims, I hope they are doing it to increase the level of the story (which is fairly low) and prompt more clicks. If there is a hidden reason unknown to us, it would be very ugly. I think it is just another case of a brain dead author managing to make more money than me... Is brain deadness an advantage when writing on the web?
1:43:22 PM
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Apple reportedly posts G5 details. The Mac maker is widely reported to have posted on its online store the specifications for new Power Macs that is powered by a new G5 processor at speeds well above its current lineup. [CNET News.com]
I simply do not believe this. The Bus speed, the 2Ghz CPU, the style of the page, makes me doubt this is really true. But now Apple is in deep shit. If the specs of the new machines are less than what MacHeads are expecting, there will be disappointment in the ranks... Rumors are bad for Apple...
9:58:04 AM
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