Doubt's Log

Microsoft sets XP update release date. The Windows XP Service Pack 1 is officially released, but will be available to the public on Sept. 9, the company says. [CNET News.com]

Microsoft adds notification services to database
Microsoft Corp. today is releasing SQL Server Notification Services, a platform for developing and deploying database applications that enable users to subscribe to informational updates. Information can be pulled from the database and forwarded to subscribers via e-mail, mobile phones or devices, instant messages or fax, according to Microsoft. [IDG: ComputerWorld]

Platforms: If you want a platform to be successful, you need massive adoption, and that means you need developers to develop for it. The best way to kill a platform is to make it hard for developers to build on it. Most of the time, this happens because platform companies either don't know that they have a platform (they think it's an application) or they get greedy (they want all the revenue for themselves.) [Joel on Software]

IT outlook darkens Sun's revenue view
"We've not seen any improvement in the current IT spending environment. In fact, some would say it might actually be worsening," Chief Financial Officer Steve McGowan said during a conference call with financial analysts. Sun says revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2003 will fall around the same level as in the first quarter of fiscal 2002, or $2.86 billion.[CNET]

Advertisement - Talk about a think about it for a sec type thing [lnk.to]

U.S. Backs Increase in Peacekeepers for Afghanistan. U.S. officials say enlarging the international force and placing its troops outside Kabul may help secure the country. By Michael R. Gordon. [New York Times: Politics]

MP3 codecs no longer free for GPL use. Or were they ever? [The Register]

They never were because the GPL would be incompatiable with the restriction of the commercial use.

 MacCentral: Apple to release Rendezvous code as open source. [Hack the Planet]

Welcome to AT%26amp;T WorldNet Service - Headline - Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves [lnk.to]

News.Com: "Apple Computer has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent its customers from burning DVDs on external drives." [Scripting News]

Groups Seek Exemptions From Curbs on Political Ads. Several organizations contend that the rules would stifle their ability to convey their views on public issues. By David Stout. [New York Times: Politics]

Explorer putting the squeeze on Netscape. Despite new technology from Netscape, Internet Explorer now commands well over 90 percent of the market, according to a new study. [CNET News.com]

IE has now reached 96 percent market share, according to StatMarket, up from 87 percent a year agoIE has now reached 96 percent market share, according to StatMarket, up from 87 percent a year ago.

Microsoft's New Irrelevance.  [osOpinion]

Not worth reading. however it has one good quote: "Buzz has been missing from Redmond, Washington, for so long that if it suddenly descended upon Microsoft headquarters, the company's executives would probably flee in terror, mistaking it for a swarm of bees sent to annihilate them."

Microsoft puts privacy policy on display. The latest beta version of the software maker's Windows Media Player 9 Series isn't shy about letting consumers control the amount of information they choose to share. [CNET News.com]

Mozilla 1.1 debuts to mixed reviews. The new browser is faster and easier to use, according to its developers. But some users are saying the software still has a ways to go. [CNET News.com]

HP and Dell ditch MS Works for WordPerfect. Retail play [The Register]

This Modern World. We've got to attack ... something. [Salon.com]

New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder [Slashdot]
Linux gets less useful.

There is an article on Security Focus talking about ICF:
ICF is an excellent security tool for most people. It blocks most attacks from the Internet. And it works automagically with applications that are aware of the ICF API. It has support for industry standard protocols like FTP, H.323, and PPTP. However, if you are a corporate user and/or a power user, you’ll probably want another personal firewall that allows more granular control. [security focus]

When did msdn start linking to weblogs?

Ray Ozzie had a lawyer at Groove, Jeff Seul, draft a weblog policy for employees. [Scripting News]

How the News works [Comics: Non Sequitur]

Taxpayer-funded lies. Antiabortion groups use "crisis-pregnancy centers" to scare women out of having abortions. Some lawmakers have cracked down on them. President Bush increased their federal funding. [Salon.com]

True in a Nutshell [lnk.to]

Secret Court Says F.B.I. Aides Misled Judges in 75 Cases. The nation's secret intelligence court says it was misled by the F.B.I. in documents in which the bureau attempted to justify its need for electronic surveillance. By Philip Shenon. [New York Times: Politics]

The API to http.sys that I test has documentation on MSDN now.

Those MS API disclosures - errors, incomplete, useless?. Situation normal, then... [The Register]

MS aims to boost .NET with Visual Studio.NET 'Everett'. Locking step for Q1 2003 [The Register]

EE Times: Banderacom to face huge cuts amid slow Infiniband market. [Hack the Planet]

Microsoft and Wireless Authentication [Slashdot]

In "What About Lessig?" Joshua Allen does a few logical backflips. Dave Winer manages to extract a useful nugget of wisdom from the peice, but what strikes me so odd is that Joshua is mixing Lessig views on open source with his views on copyrights with his views on the End-to-End'ness of the Internet which I am under the impression he keeps seperate. I haven't read his views of (open) source code access, and I have to agree with putting an upper bound on copyrights. (life of author plus X where X < 10? whatever), but I was in agreement with Lessig during his talk at microsoft about the end to end issues (which is the arguements Lessig was making in the article Joshua torn apart). I remeber asking lessig what he thought about the idea of some protocols being available in a RAND fassion. He didn't knee jerk say that it was bad, but reminded me that sometimes the reasonable part of RAND could be very expensive, so it depends on that. This is not the Lessig Joshua paints at the end of his rant about "the Collective".

Ordinary people, extraordinary evil. What kind of person can attack, mutilate and kill a total stranger or even a neighbor? A scholar talks about the dark potential in all of us.

"It's easier for me to sleep at night if I think that perpetrators of genocide and mass killing are lunatics or insane or only found in cultures like Germany. I don't blame people for jumping to those explanations. But for me it begins with the issue of numbers. We know that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, but very seldom do we step back and ask the question: How many people does it take to kill 6 million people? We know that 800,000 Rwandans died in 100 days, but again, how many people does it take to kill 800,000 people?" [Salon.com]

Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology [PolicyReview]
Extreamly intresting motive insight, semi-wacko conclusions.

MSN cuddles up to OS X. Snaring newbies [The Register]

Nondiscretionary Controls: can't live with 'em, can't... [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Ray Ozzie does a good job explaining the motivations for something like Palladium. Something to remeber about palladium (from what I understand) is that it's first deployment will be corperate PCs to keep internal data, internal. The success of such a technology is not wrapped around hollywood and consumer PCs, but rather it's success of keeping a group of people's data secure inside the group.

Doesn't Do Windows
Lindows is an operating system for Microsoft haters and cheapskates. Its flaws make Windows seem like a genuine bargain. [Forbes/Yahoo!]

Learned a tiny little bit about Event Tracing last night. The command "Logman Query Providers" gives the first glimnce of this feature. The details about how the feature works and what APIs are use it are available on MSDN.

Microsoft to Issue Fewer Stock Options, Gates Says [Bloomberg.com]

Coming up next: Ambushed on "Donahue"!
More dangerous than Grand Theft Auto 3 -- a defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here's what he really wanted to say. [salon]

Switcher's remorse. An Episcopal priest goes from Windows to Mac but then has second thoughts. Is her computing soul at risk? [Salon.com]

Bush's Mideast Sand Trap. The Bush policy today is to punish its enemies with the threat of democracy and reward its friends with silence on democratization. By Thomas L. Friedman. [New York Times: Opinion]

test?

Office XP vs. bugs, round two. Microsoft plans to release its second "comprehensive" collection of bug fixes, or service pack, on Wednesday. [CNET News.com]

I remember once reading about the mirror way of thinking. The basic idea of the miror is that many complaints or rationlizing from one party to another should be examined in the other direction. I've read many things that critize payfor software for borrowing things in the public domain without giving back, and then today I realized that the thing I dislike the most about the GPL is that so much of it is copying from the public domain (and payfor domain) without giving anything back. I once wrote a little app for beos. I released it with the GPL because I had used a header of id3 genre name to id mappings from a GPL'd piece of source code, had I not done that I would have released it into the public domain. So what if some company picked up my source and made a better product with it? Software would have improved, and my life as a user would have improved.

Yahoo! News - Going Up? Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator [lnk.to]

The Real Thing
And as my colleague Frank Rich points out, to offset the revenue losses from his tax cut, Mr. Bush would have to veto a $5 billion spending proposal every working day for the next year. Mr. Bush can no longer pretend, as he did during the 2000 campaign, that there is enough money for everything [lnk.to]

RealNetworks Launches New Player. RealNetworks began offering a new digital media player on Tuesday that plays back music and video in all formats, including those of its main competitor, Microsoft Corp. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]

Common ground. It's funny how people can disagree with one another, yet all agree with Tim. [Sam Ruby]