Posted 9:24 AM (0) comments

Dell, others sued over size of hard drives - 2003-09-18 - Austin Business Journal

The competition for stupidest class-action lawsuit of the year just heated up as a number of clueless Southern Californians sue Dell, Apple, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba over the advertised size of disk drives on their computers. Seems they're appalled that the manufacturers advertise a 20 gigabyte disk drive, but there's only 18+ gig of usable storage space. The plaintiffs lawyers spout some gobbledegook about the difference between binary and decimal notation (i.e., 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes, not 1000 megabytes) but the real truth is that the manufacturers advertise the unformated capacity - that's the way its been for the past 20 years, at least. Formatting, partitioning and other housekeeping can use approx. 10% of the drive space. Nothing's new, nothing's different, nothing's misleading. Just another sleazy lawyer looking for a quick payoff.

Posted 8:52 AM (0) comments

Had I but Known!

Somewhat belatedly, the US Senate (or, at least, some of its members) have discovered that they gave IP copyright holders broad powers in the 1998 Digital millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). According to this Network World story ("More senators question DMCA subpoenas"), three more U.S. senators have questioned a provision in the DCMA that allows copyright holders to subpoena the names of alleged file traders without first getting a judge's permission, with one suggesting that the DMCA subpoenas give copyright holders more power than U.S. law enforcement agencies have to seek information on terrorists. Well, John AShcroft couldn't have that, could he?

This very issue was brought up repeatedly during the hearings on DCMA before it was passed, so its a bit hypocritical for these senators to suddenly discover that they were evidently hoodwinked by Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley! But, then, hypocrisy has often been considered a pre-requisite for election to the Senate.

Posted 6:36 PM (0) comments

How full is that glass?

According to this story on CNET, ICANN will continue its reign over the Net after signing an agreement with the US government that extends for three years the organization's role as overseer of the Net's domain name hierarchy and address space--but with some key changes. Evidently (and you should read the agreement to render your own interpretation of the governmentese) ICANN has been directed to clean up its act as well as to plan for its potential demise (under the guise of a "disaster recovery" plan).

While few people have any good words for what ICANN has so far accomplished, and while many feel that the only solution is to scrap the organization entirely nevertheless this new plan - if its strictly enforced by the US administration - could be the salvation we've been looking for.

Posted 8:45 AM (0) comments

Sell 'em what we've got!

I worked as a salesman for a wholesaler for a couple of years back in the 70's. Each week, the sakes people would come in to a meeting and report what the customers were saying about the products they'd like to see. Invariably, the sales manager would trot out a list of our current inventory and say "Don't sell them what they want, sell them what we've got!." Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger was playing that role on Monday when he told reporters attending the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose that 64-bit desktop computing is unnecessary.  Of course, Intel has no plans to produce enough 64-bit chips so that the technology could spread from servers to desktops to notebooks. But rival AMD does. Desktop users are beginning to run into real problems with the "limited" addressing space of 32-bit CPUs and the clamor for the expanded RAM made possible by 64-bit chips will only get louder.

Posted 8:55 AM (0) comments

Do the crime, Pay the fine

My Network World colleague Paul Macnamara thinks that its "Time to pay the piper" As he says in his column this week: "Those who had to swallow subpoenas - and write checks for thousands of dollars, in some cases - downloaded more than a thousand purloined files and made their stashes available to any and all comers over the 'Net. That's not 'sharing.' That's distributing stolen goods, even if the distributor isn't receiving any money in return and even if the distributor is in junior high school or a member of AARP.

Copyright violation is not a "victimless crime" by any means - real people suffer real economic loss when illegal trading occurs. But we (the collective "we", that is) don't want to see this as a crime any more than we think parking in a handicapped space ("just for a moment, while I pick up a latte") or driving alone in the car pool lane ("I had to pass that slow poke!") or even releasing a worm on the Internet ("...it came completely out of the blue that I was going to be arrested and charged with this offense”, said Jeffrey Lee Poarson when he was charged with spreading the Blaster worm).

If you don't like a law, then work to get it changed. If you want to demonstrate the law's problems through "civil disobedience", then be prepared to suffer the consequences of your act as you work for the greater good. But if you're simply lazy, or cheap, then you'd better be ready to pay the fine or do the time because eventually the law will catch up with you.