Products released in 1997?!?

This whole 'patent wars' thing is ridiculous.

At the very least, there needs to be a limit to how long you can sit on some alleged infringement before you pounce, or else I may as well claim that someone slapped me in the face 40 years ago but, oops, their memory is gone by now, oh well, give me a default judgment anyway..

The First Hit is Free

A good drug dealer only gives away the initial sample. Once the quarry is addicted, it's bill-paying time.

MS's market has matured now, the world is thoroughly addicted, so we can expect to see them pulling-back on the freebies.

Future

Recently installed a Sonicwall VPN device for a client, first product from them I've recommended in years.

I wonder what Dell will do with them - keep the branding or rename it Dell, remove product lines, maintain or remove support for legacy products, etc.

I've not been particularly impressed with Dell's networking products in the past. Have no idea about their support, but if it's anything like what used to drive me nuts with their PC support (treating you like garbage unless you claim to be a Fortune 500 corporation or something), I'm not looking forward to this.

I wanted to like LibreOffice...

Tried to use it in a small office situation, but it was so riddled with bugs of every kind, and the killing blow was its interoperability with MS Office 2010 docx/xlsx format was terrible. (Documents edited in LIBO ended up with severe errors or wouldn't even open at all sometimes in MSO2010)

No matter how much I may like the product, if I can't send documents to other people who are inevitably married to MS products and expect them to be able to open/edit them, it's a showstopper.

I still have it on one of my boxes but I'm lucky I only use it there for the simplest tasks, and typically don't require collaborating with the inevitable MS-using masses.

Pity about the look

Too bad about that ugly front fascia. I always thought Dell did that mostly to hide their poorly engineered hardware. And who the heck has the time to unlock a faceplate every time they need to check something, and keep track of all the keys?

Perhaps this is the beginning of the "Megging" of the company. Ugh.

Hindsight, take 2..

Not only the disk drive industry, but Sony and Nikon's DSLR plants are underwater too.

Seems to me, looking at various photos of flooded factories, that all these companies would have needed to do to prevent 80% of the problem with ruined machinery/inventory was simply to install all the equipment and inventory storage on the 2nd floor.

Make the 1st floor a parking-lot, and as soon as the waters subside, back to business. (Well, except for the issues with other local infrastructure and parts suppliers)

DNS zone change? Wut?

I for one would like to know why they had to push out a DNS zone update in order for their sites to start working again.

That's like saying TheReg went down because overnight its DNS servers forgot what the IP was of its webserver or web proxy.*

Something is fishy.

*(Well yeah I know, but that was NetNames boffins forgetting - er, with a little help - what TheReg's IP addresses were. :P )

That's the State Dept's responsibility, ultimately.

While it would be nice, I actually don't expect all US-based businesses that do business internationally to have comprehensive tracking of the complete and detailed political picture in every single area they seek to do business in.

If the US government has a problem with US-based businesses doing business in certain countries, it's the job of the US State Department to make that clear and to embargo those countries. I would expect that Microsoft, as well as any other legitimate business, would honor those embargos. (Despite the various evils that Microsoft can be accused of, I have seen no evidence so far that they have a habit of flouting those sorts of rules. Unlike some companies like Google - ie with the recently-revealed "Canadian Pharmacy" thing)

After all, if US.gov were so puritannical about not doing business with "impure regimes", then one would not be able to list dozens of them that the USA gladly supports on a daily basis for political expediency purposes. (Hellooooo China) Expecting businesses to second-guess who is on the "in-list" or "out-list" on a daily basis is absurd, given the hypocritical nature of such lists in the first place.

The battle of the ideologues

Yes, the press has been ignorant on some points and exaggerated things in some cases. But then you have the people on the other side of the fence that aren't doing us any favors by minimizing things, either.

The Japanese government have prohibited the sale of various foodstuffs from the region due to radioactive contamination, as well as issued the well-known Tokyo etc water warnings. Governments from around the world including most of the top "advanced western democracies" including the top nuclear power-producers in the world have banned imports of Japanese food due to concern over radioactive contamination.

The entire situation has been mis-handled both technically* and from a PR standpoint by the Japanese government and by TESCO - a firm which has a long history of nuclear coverups.

Waving it all away as some sort of political ploy (ie "the mayor of Tokyo wants to make his political rivals look bad") or 100% willful ignorance on the part of the mainstream media is wishful thinking to say the least.

(I believe that one reason the media are mis-reporting things is that they, like myself, are still in the process of educating themselves on the finer points of what constitutes a dangerous radioactivity measurement, and the fact that nuclear accidents are still such rare and uncharted territory it's not extremely surprising that everyone including journalists are nervous about the implications.)

*(Dumping SEAWATER on the reactors from helicopters? Is this some sort of cartoon, or just a bad dream?)

Not sure what's worse

This ridiculously overextended legal debacle, or the endlessly drawn-out demise of Commodore/Amiga...

Into the dustbin with them

After having become thoroughly disgusted with NetSol back in the days before Verisign got involved, I never had much interest in doing any future business with them.

Then after the various divestments, re-acquisitions, etc etc, I was mildly curious if they would ever escape from their well-deserved sordid reputation.

It looks like this debacle pretty much seals their fate. It's time to relegate them to the dustbin of history..

Put 'em in jail

This scam has been around practically forever, and they are only ruling against them now?

They made off with $5M in ill-gotten gains and they are being fined $10,000 COLLECTIVELY because of their "inability to pay"?

Something is SERIOUSLY wrong here.

Throw 'em in the slammer.

Bald-faced lying... welcome to Wall Street!

There are a few believable reasons why an organization might choose to use IE6 over Opera, but SECURITY is NOT one of them. Opera has the best track-record in the industry in that regard.

Furthermore with Chrome, a large part of its security functionality is not even under its own control - it relies on Microsoft's encryption and SSL engine while running under Windoze, for example. Which is why every time Microsoft has a security flaw there, so does Chrome. (it's already happened at least once)

Banks remain one of the most clueless web service providers, and I have worked with some in a commercial context whose blatant ignorance of basic security practices (invalid SSL certs, anyone?) would boggle your mind...

Don't forget the Windoze trojan-horse

Novell made some strategic mistakes, yes.

But - do not underestimate the impact of the far-reaching tentacles of the DOS/Windows ecosystem.

Every dim-bulb in the universe was familiar with it. Which turned out to be extremely important, as businesses increasingly turned to those dim-bulbs (and former secretaries, and accounting clerks) to run their networks.

Those sorts of people could pretend to know what they were doing on a windoze server, even if they really didn't, because it sorta looked the same as their silly Windoze-95 thingy at home. Whereas they would have been completely lost trying to just boot a Netware box. (or most anything else, for that matter)

Commonplace prank - most people never get prosecuted

The ONLY reason this kid got such a harsh treatment is who he got himself wrapped-up with. This kind of thing happens every day, and is usually brushed-off as no more than an annoying prank, and everyone moves on.

Palin had to make a big stink out of it because there were some very embarrassing revelations about her that were revealed as the result of it.

She has now successfully managed to re-frame the public debate to focus on her as "victim", and nicely deflected attention from the fact that this kid provided some pretty concrete evidence of her unethical and hypocritical nature.

Blame the holier-than-thou DAs like Blumenthal

CL NEVER CHARGED for those ads UNTIL loudmouth DAs like Blumenthal and that other yokel Henry McMaster from South Carolina (who was trying to get re-elected) got their pious PR machines going making a big stink about it. Which forced CL to A) waste tons of time/money fighting frivolous lawsuits that were ultimately thrown out of court, B) hire extra staff solely for the purpose of vetting the adult ads, and C) started requiring a credit-card as a way of verifying identity.

I'm sure that far more criminal acts in this country get committed with the assistance of the telephone, yet I haven't heard calls to shut down all the telephone companies for that "sin".

Plain and simple, these are political hacks trying to make a name for themselves, they are either right-wingers like McMaster that see little to like about progressive businesses like CL, or publicity hounds like Blumenthal trying to create false controversies. Blumental went after MySpace before CL. According to wikipedia:

"In 2007, Hans Bader, Counsel for Special Projects of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (a Libertarian think-tank) ranked Blumenthal as "the nation's worst state attorney general", based on "a set of explicit criteria — such as encroachment on the powers of other branches of government, meddling in the affairs of other states or federal agencies, encouragement of judicial activism and frivolous lawsuits, favoritism towards campaign contributors, ethical breaches, and failure to provide representation to state agencies or to provide legal advice."[56] Bader singled out Blumenthal for his role in the 1998 tobacco settlement and state efforts to regulate carbon dioxide in other states through lawsuits against out-of-state companies.[57]

Rob Simmons, one of Blumenthal's Republican contenders for Senator of Connecticut, has circulated this document on the Internet, charging Blumenthal with "supporting meritless, politically-driven lawsuits."[58]"

"...password security auditing on Wi-Fi networks..."

ROFLMAO

s/security auditing/cracking by script kiddies/

Carly disaster

It's a shame that the people in the tech business at the time of Fiorina's reign at HP don't comprise a higher proportion of the voter base, because if they did, she wouldn't have a solidified block of water's chance in that hot place of winning anything.

Here's a detailed, highly-footnoted business analysis of her FAIL-tenure at HP:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/187962046_1.html

Both Paypal and the banks stink

As various people here have noted, Paypal's age-old habit of arbitrarily preventing or greatly delaying users from accessing money which is rightfully theirs, and their sleazy dealings in general, are well-documented.

Then again, banks these days are not exactly endearing themselves to the public. Here in the USA, the credit-card industry have been engaging in mafioso-like shenanigans for decades. Then when the US Congress finally gets around to passing legislation to put an end to the worst abuses, in the 6-9 months before the act takes effect, they go all out with the bogus fees and penalties, pull the credit rug out from under people that have been reliable customers for years, ganging up on their "customers" hoping to get one last good shot in before the shackles finally go on.

They all need to go take a long walk on a short plank.

I don't see it

I think Dino Saur made some good points.

Femtocells seem interesting to provide voice coverage for a residential location where existing cell coverage is poor.

And sure, they can do 3G as well, which could be handy.

But if an early adopter of the latest 4G technology is so concerned about getting better than 3Mbps speed via their mobile *in their own house*, doncha think if they already had high-performance broadband installed there that they'd already be accessing it over 802.11a/g/n anyway?

Reform desperately needed

Now that ICANN is finally released from complete US control, maybe there might be a bit more sanity in such policies. (Hope springs eternal, eh?)

We have to have the public WHOIS database, unless we want the internet to complete its transition to 100% scammers, spammers and botnets.

Re: personal details being abused, I'm only partially sympathetic. #1 because if you wanna run with the big dogs and have a cute personal (yet public) domain, there are responsibilities that go along with that. As someone else mentioned, get a private maildrop if you don't want to list your home address. #2 there are domain privacy services that will mask that info, but see below.

The "domain privacy" have become part of the problem. There needs to be standards here, and at the same time we need an EXPEDIENT way of getting public WHOIS info for the billions of people out there who have a legitimate right to know if the junk someone is sending them (or providing a link to) is linked to a legitimate organization or not. Having to send a snail-mail to a generic address in the hopes of eventually getting a snail-mail reply about who it is that is trying to sell you something just doesn't cut it.

Getting the domain industry's hand out of the corporate bank-account would be a good 1st step.

@James Harrington,. re: "non-Apple software"

"First off I genuinely do have very few non apple apps on my computer and iPhone. I use OS X, iWork, iLife as the majority of my work is done building websites from CMS's like wordpress. "

I truly love these throwback types.

A web developer who pretends there is only one web browser in use in the world. Tim Berners-Lee would be awfully proud of 'ya.

OLD news for Dell

What cracks me up is that these are EXACTLY the kinds of stupidities that soured me on that brand for over 10 years now.

I've always been amazed at Dell's success and mindshare amongst the public. The only thing I can think of is their practice of immediately grading you as a customer into #1 "Fortune 500 corporate" (or journalist, seemingly), #2 "Medium-sized business", or #3 "Small biz/individual peon" and treating you accordingly.

I always wondered whether the movers/shakers in tier #1 were the only ones treated well, since they had the most influence on the press coverage and public perception of the company. Because as someone who always came in as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 customer under that regime, I certainly never experienced anything remotely impressive about Dell, back when I still dealt with them.

You meant Outlook EXPRESS, right?

Yanno, I'm not exactly a MS fanboy, but I really don't know why you journalists keep acting as though Thunderbird is a "competitor" to Outlook.

First of all, Outlook costs money.

Second of all, Outlook is a full-fledged groupware client, with an integrated group-shareable calendar, shareable contact lists, and other collaboration features. NONE of that stuff comes with Tbird, even with the not-very-well-integrated Lightning add-on.

There are all sorts of free and/or open-source groupware clients (ie Zimbra, Scalix, Open Groupware, and the standalone Evolution client which is now owned by Novell) which really do compete with Outlook. Tbird doesn't.

Background on the share ownership

It needs to be reiterated that craigslist never expected or desired an organization like eBay to have a stake in the company. It was a hostile situation from the start.

It was a naive act on the part of Craig to assign a huge block of shares in his namesake company to an untrustworthy person who ended up leaving and making a huge profit by selling those shares to eBay. I can't believe the former shareholder did not know how disastrous such a sale would be viewed by craigslist. But craigslist could do little about it once it happened.

It must have felt sickening to have that fox in the henhouse all those years, and I really don't blame them at all for trying to dilute eBay's stake. eBay and Meg Whitman pretty much stand in opposition to most of craigslist's core values. And craigslist is nothing if not an organization who has steadfastly stuck to those values, something that we certainly can't say for eBay. I don't doubt that the idea of an eBay-assimiliated craigslist with his name on it would be an extremely troubling situation for Craig to endure.