« February 2005 | Main | April 2005 »

Consumer rights move to superior court

Your right to listen to music in the way you want is up for review. The US superior court is currently hearing a case that MGM filed against the file sharing network Grokster.

You've probably heard it all before, but the case revolves around the question if the creators of peer-to-peer networks can be held responsible for the copyright violations that they enable.

We had a ruling on this case in the form of the Sony-Betamax case. There it was ruled that Sony couldn't be held liable for consumers using a video recorder to illegally copy copyrighted materials. After all, Sony developed the device to allow consumers to watch rented or purchased movies.

Similarly US courts have always denied liability claims against gun makers. Guns don't kill people, people kill people, gun makers and their buddies at the NRA will argue.

While copyright holders will cry foul over the massive theft of music that's going on a daily basis, and nobody seems to disagree that it is wrong to steal copyrighted materials. But technologists will argue that making the creators of peer-to-peer networks partially liable is taking it too far.

The problem is: what if the record industry has its way?

As Salon.com explains:
If the entertainment studios had their way, every time a format changed, you'd have to buy all your records all over again. In their ideal world, we would hold restricted licenses to our content, not ownership. Digital rights management would cripple our all-powerful computers, creating backups would be impossible, and the basic human impulse to share the wealth of information that helps define who we are would be beset with obstacles. This is not paranoia. At every step of the way, intellectual-property-right holders have resisted technological innovations that give ordinary people more scope to enjoy and consume music, television, movies or any other content.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. And so should you.

March 31, 2005 at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Low Debian voter turnout hints towards dwindling developer's interest

Debian is looking for a new leader, but developers don't seem too interested in who's at the helm of the Linux distribution. At the time of writing only 269 of the project's 960 developers had voted.

The low turnout could hint that the the developer community behind the project is falling apart, suspects Debian Project secretary Manoj Srivastava. The project could be "coming apart at the seams" as a result of a heated discussion about adding support for AMD64 in upcoming versions of the distribution.

A more optimistic view would be that voters simply can't choose between all these fine candidates who have so eloquently made their points in their campaigns.

Yet something tells me that the first reason is more likely to be the cause.

March 31, 2005 at 04:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New HP CEO stands his first test

It must be the most hated part of Mark Hurd's new job: two days before he officially starts working as the new CEO for HP, Hurd this morning had his first meeting with financial analysts and the media.

Hurd got off an airplane yesterday (Tuesday) night at 9 PM, and that in fact was his main message: he wasn't going to reveal any big plans just yet.

At a press conference at HP's head quarters in Palo Alto, Heard faced a small army of Silicon Valley IT trade press and a collection of local and national media. I counted about ten television crews, most of which brought their trucks to do on the spot editing.

Hurd has two days before he officially takes over the helm as CEO. He'd better use that time to get settled and spend some of the $2.75 m he received as a relocation allowance (he must have some awfully large chairs that need moving…). And in the mean time he'd better get used to the level of media exposure that he gets. Because this HP company gets a little more interest than his former employer NCR.

Mark Hurd faces the media storm.

Television trucks take over the HP campus.

A press conference doesn't make for good TV, but that didn't stop a small army of crews from showing up.

March 31, 2005 at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Comdex-less year awaits

Turns out that the covert sales mission to Cebit that MediaLive undertook earlier this month was only to benefit a 2006 edition of "Comdex".

The organiser had already decided to axe the 2005 edition of the trade show by January. At least, that's when the Las Vegas Convention Center cancelled the reservation for the event.

If the show resurfaces, it won't be called Comdex, according to the sales pitches that MediaLive used on exhibitors at the Cebit trade fair in Hannover earlier this month – but it still isn't know what the name for the event will be.

March 30, 2005 at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Computing at the speed of light

The race to marry silicon and lasers took an interesting turn when a small chip firm managed to outsmart Intel.

Luxtera doesn't even have its own fab but has managed to build the ultra-fine conduits needed to send fast data successfully into silicon using lasers. This bypasses all the expensive fibre optic connection kit currently needed, and opens up fibre speeds of 10Gbps to many more people.

For those of us who can remember the excitement at finally getting a modem that could manage 10Kbps these are heady times. There's a way to go yet but the first steps are being taken.

One side-effect of the announcement is that Intel is going to be stepping up its research. The chip giant has been spending a lot of time shifting to multi-core processing and it'll be interesting to see if it has kept up with other projects as well.

One suspects that the lights were burning late last night in Intel's labs.

March 30, 2005 at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Intel's Pat Gelsinger still can't believe his luck

It won't happen to you every day that your job function changes from Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group. But that's what happened to Pat Gelsinger a few months ago.

You would imagine that somebody who in the past has been involved with designing chips and since worked his way up to the CTO position (by the way, Gelsinger is the youngest vice president in the history of the company) is less than happy with having to worry about pesky details like sales and marketing.

But not Pat Gelsinger. "This is the job I picked," he said on Tuesday at a company event. "We are still a little bit in the honeymoon period. we are gaining momentum. we are getting ourselves more competitive and the future looks great."

March 30, 2005 at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

HP goes for the mystery CEO

Let's hope HP's head hunter knows what it's doing. The company just went for the mystery price behind door number three in the quest for a new CEO and out came Mark Hurd.

"Mark who?" you ask? Mark Hurd. Up until today he was CEO for NCR, a company best known for making ATMs and other financial solutions for the retail industry. It made a tidy $6 bn in revenues last year, but that is still nothing compared to HP's $80 bn.

The guy's appointment couldn’t mean a bigger break with the past, the era when celebrity CEO Carly Fiorina held the helm at the printer and computer company.

Hurd worked at the same company for 25 years, slowly rising to the number one position. When he became CEO in 2003, he found a company in trouble. Revenues had plummeted. So Hurd started cutting costs like crazy and within months turned the company around.

That might be an admirable feat, but to be quite honest Hurd strikes me as extremely boring and lacking any vision.

What was HP's board of directors looking for? A CEO that would save HP by coming up with a new strategy that would change the world? Or someone more obedient, who would dutiful listen to the board and respectfully execute their plans?

Since they got the first with Carly Fiorina, HP's board seems to have chosen the latter now that the little Fiorina experiment has gone wrong.

Investors clearly like Hurd for now. The company's stock jumped 10 percent after the announcement.

March 30, 2005 at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft has to stand at the back

Here's a story to warm the cockles of the heart this morning. A professor in Microsoft's home state of Washington has started a campaign to improve the quality of the company's grammar-checking function in Word.

It seems that the professor finally cracked when he noticed the poor quality of students' essays after they had been run through the software. Now he wants Redmond to do something about it.

As someone who spends more time than most hunched over a hot keyboard this can only be welcome news. I've long ago learnt to smother the annoyance that flares every time the computer asks me to make a duff change, but if students are relying on Microsoft alone to teach them grammar we're in for a garbled new century.

To be fair this kind of thing is a real pain to code successfully. Speech recognition software has similar problems. We humans are a capricious lot; our spoken and written languages might be organised along broadly accepted rules, but they're jam packed with the kind of exceptions and eccentricities that drive software developers nuts. 

I wish the professor luck, although I don't rate his chances.

March 29, 2005 at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New US law enforces computer security honesty

Banks whose computer systems are hacked or suffer any other breach in their IT security from now on have to inform their customers about that if personal data has been exposed, new regulations from several US federal agencies require.

The lucky residents of California have had the joy of living under the Security Breach Information Act for over a year. The local law has similar requirements as the new federal one, but in addition to that applies to any company that suffers a breach in their IT security.

The new rules are so amazingly obvious that it's remarkable that they haven't been put in place earlier.

Companies for years have been lacking the motivation to properly tackle IT security because it is cheaper to clean up a mess than it is to prevent it from happening. Now that they are required to go public with these embarrassing facts, they might have more of an inclination to spring into action.

Self-regulation has had its chance for the past decades, and by now we can state without the smallest doubt that it doesn't work. Let's hope that this is only the start of a slew of new rules and regulations around the world.

[Entry copied from vnunet.com's Security Watchdog blog.]

March 29, 2005 at 01:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

SunGard acquisition stuck between just another buyout and a trendsetting tech buyout

SunGard has agreed to a sale of the company to a consortium of seven financial parties for approximately $11.3 billion. SunGard developer software for the financial sector, including solution that do transactions at stock exchanges and back and disaster recovery.

The deal is noteworthy because buyouts are rare in the high tech sector.

A buyout is a deal where a financial party such as a bank or venture capital investor acquires a company. Such deals typically use highly complex financing constructions relying on bonds heavily. In SunGard's case the investors put up $3.5 billion in cash while taking out a $7.8 billion bond. The investors thereby create a leverage: if they sell the company for 13 billion, they only play $7.8 bn to the bond holders, keeping 5.2 bn to themselves (making for a cool 49 pct profit margin).

Buyout deals usually make sense when a company is underperforming due to an outdated strategy or heavy debt burden. By creating some new momentum, the buyout firms are able to do the necessary restructuring and kill loss making parts of the business. Eventually they'll achieve a return on their investment by selling of the company piecemeal, as a whole or by taking it public.

Traditionally buyouts take place in the manufacturing and retail sectors. Companies in such sectors have very stable revenue streams, minimizing the risk for buyout firms. Because the high tech sector is characterized by volatile revenues, buyout firms traditionally have shunned this area of the economy.

That's why the big question is: does the SunGard deal signal a growing up of the software space, readying it for more and similar deals in the future? Or is SunGard the odd duck, the one company in this high tech industry that is an attractive target for a buyout?

It could be that it's Easter Monday, or that SunGard is just one of the most boring companies in the software industry, because it seems that very few industry analyst firms cover SunGard. The most likely reason for it being so quiet from the industry analyst front is that buyout deals are so uncommon in this industry that no-one seems to know what to make of this one.

Computerworld seemed to be the only publication that found someone to comment on this story:

"These private equity firms are not looking to make this huge investment in the company just so that it can carry on the way it is," Octavio Marenzi, managing director of financial consultant Celent Communications told the publication. "The only thing that applies is breaking this company up and selling it off."

March 28, 2005 at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack