From Recording Industry vs The People blog:

Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright infringement, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007.

Suing the disabled is not new to the RIAA. Both Atlantic v. Andersen in Oregon and Elektra v. Schwartz in New York were suits brought against disabled people who have never engaged in file sharing, and whose sole income is Social Security Disability. Both of these cases are still pending. The local Michigan lawyer being used by the RIAA in the Paladuk case is the same lawyer who was accused by a 15 year old girl of telling her what to say at her deposition in Motown v. Nelson. In the Warner v. Scantlebury case, after the defendant died during the lawsuit, the same lawyer indicated to the court that he was going to give the family ‘60 days to grieve’ before he would start deposing the late Mr. Scantlebury’s children.”

From a post on Slashdot from user “rtobyr”:

“I don’t allow users at my organization to use any third party e-mail. When users complain, I point out that we can’t control the security policies of outside systems. End users tend to think that big business will of course have good security; so I ran a test of the ‘Big Four’: Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, and GMail. Yahoo Mail was the only webmail provider to allow delivery of a VBS script. GMail was the only provider to block a zipped VBS script. End users also tend to think that a big business would never pull security features out from under their customers. Of course, we know that AOL and Microsoft have both compromised the security of their customers. I don’t know of any security related bad press for Yahoo or Google. Three of my Big Four either allow VBS attachments or have a poor security track records. So, if you are a network administrator, do you limit your users’ ability to use third party e-mail, and if so, do you allow for GMail or other providers that you’ve deemed to have secure systems and reputations?”

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Apple is poised to make its first major pitch to couch potatoes with the release of a video-streaming set-top box for the television.

Industry sources say the Cupertino, Calif., company will ship the $299 product, called Apple TV, on Tuesday, about three weeks later than Apple originally planned. The company hasn’t confirmed a launch date.

Apple hopes to have the same success with video in the living room that it’s had with music on the go with the iPod. But the Apple TV is far from a guaranteed hit, even though it doesn’t face any direct competition as an Internet video device.

Analysts say it’s likely to sell well initially. The company has taken pre-orders for more than 100,000 units, analysts say. But how well the product sells after that initial wave will depend on word of mouth and the ability of Apple store employees to demonstrate it persuasively.

Apple TV is a big deal for the consumer electronics industry, says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with the research firm Creative Strategies.

“It will be the first product that really gets the mainstream consumer interested in moving PC content to the television for viewing on a TV set,” Bajarin said. Other devices can do that today, but Apple has shown an ability to make simple, easy-to-use products.

With Apple TV, people can access via remote control movies and TV shows purchased from Apple’s iTunes download store. The set-top box links to Apple Macintosh computers and PCs running Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system using existing wireless and wired networks.

The device could have limited appeal beyond consumers who have bought a lot of videos off iTunes, analysts say.

“Consumers need to invest in enough video content to justify the purchase,” said Josh Martin, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a research firm. “It’s not like where you have 100 CDs and you can rip them (to your PC) and all of a sudden you have a cache of content for your iPod.”

While copying music CDs to your PC is considered fair use, copying DVD movies to your PC is considered illegal, Martin says.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has positioned the Apple TV as a replacement for the DVD player. But it will take time for consumers to get used to the idea of buying purely digital versions of movies, Martin says.

Also, many consumers might find Apple TV limiting because it can play only videos purchased from iTunes. And unlike other Internet movie services, such as CinemaNow and Movielink, it doesn’t let people rent videos or subscribe to an all-you-can-watch service.

“Apple lives in a closed-ended world,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research.

For the same $300 it costs to get a dedicated video-streaming device such as Apple TV, you could buy a much more capable Xbox 360 from Microsoft, he says. The Xbox 360 is a video game console as well as a video-download device. And Xbox 360 offers movie downloads in high definition, something Apple TV doesn’t offer.

“Three hundred dollars is a lot to spend just to extend the functionality of your iTunes account,” McQuivey said.

Early buyers of Apple TV likely will use it more to stream their music and photos to their TV, Bajarin says. Consumers also will be able to access audio and video podcasts through the device.

That last line would be me.  I have been looking for a year now to find a good sloution to playing my large CD library throough my main entertainment system as well as organize it. My Yamaha RX-V2700 receiver came the closest yet, but it uses Windows Media Connect to connect to my computer and that interface is clunky at best.

So if the new Apple TV has all the functionality of iTunes, it may be my best solutiuon yet.  We shall see.

From CNET UK:

We shed a small nostalgic tear this morning as we encountered Commodore’s new range of gaming PCs. Four models are planned — from top to bottom performance-wise, the XX, GX, GS and G.

The high-end XX packs enough grunt to make an Alienware machine run to its deformed alien mum. It uses an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM and two Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards running in tandem. The bottom G wimps out with an E6320 1.83GHz dual-core chip, 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS — but even this is fast enough to run most games.

If the specs alone don’t rock your world, just check out the gorgeous cases they come in. Commodore Gaming PCs are fitted with interchangeable ‘C-Kin’ panels so you can customise them to your heart’s content. There are literally dozens of designs to choose from including the Classic Commodore Jupiter Lander and Louis Vuitton (both pictured).

They’re not cheap, nasty plastic things, either — Commodore uses what it calls a ‘revolutionary painting process’ to make them look pretty damn gorgeous. You can check out the rest of the pics here.

The Gaming PCs are expected to go on sale this April for an as-yet unknown price. But you can bet they won’t be cheap.

Commodore web site here

From Computerworld:

Dell Inc. is the first computer system supplier to offer 1TB (1,000GB) hard drive upgrades for PCs targeted at users who need to store large amounts of digital media.

The higher capacity, which comes in the form of  a Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Deskstar 7K100 drive, is particularly needed for storing video content, such as high-definition video for gaming, Dell said.

So how much can you store on a 1TB drive? Some examples include a million photos, a million minutes of music or 16 days of DVD quality video.

Dell’s vice president, Neil Hand said in a press release, “This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we’re now able to bring it to consumers.”

The first Dell PCs to use the Hitachi drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. Dell’s XPS systems will then follow suit. A check on the US Alienware site shows four 1TB drives can be shipped.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 drive spins at 7,200rpm with a 3Gbit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5 milliseconds and a write time of 9.2 milliseconds. It has a 32MB cache and an 8.7 millisecond average seek time.

Dell is also launching a ‘video time capsule service’; users can use to upload videos to where Dell will store them, initially on the 1TB drives, for a claimed 50 years.

It is also to be expected that external USB-connected drives used for backup by manufacturers like La Cie will offer products with twice the capacity of current 500GB-drive ones currently available. Dell’s 1TB drive is priced at $540.

Dell press release here

From PC Magazine:

Those little blue flash cards that store photos and video clips in digital cameras and camcorders keep adding more capacity as users keep creating more content.

SanDisk, which invented the SD-format flash storage card, on March 16 introduced an 8GB SD High Capacity (SDHC) version—twice that of the highest capacity now available in the familiar SD format.

The new card is estimated to hold more than 4,000 high-resolution pictures and as many as 2,000 digital songs or up to 15 hours of MPEG 4 video.

SanDisk, of Milpitas, Calif., showed the new cards at the CeBIT conference in Hannover, Germany. The conference began March 15 and continues through March 21.

From Newsfactor.com:

Cisco Systems, best known as a manufacturer of networking hardware , is taking a major step into the software applications field. Cisco announced on Thursday that it is spending $57 a share, or roughly $3.2 billion, to acquire WebEx, a company that builds and deploys technologies and services to allow businesses to collaborate over networks and the Internet. Cisco and WebEx expect to finalize the acquisition during the fourth quarter of 2007.

WebEx was founded in 1996, and has since grown into one of the market leaders in online meeting applications. The company is based in Santa Clara, California, and currently has nearly 2,200 employees. The publicly traded company reported total earnings in fiscal year 2006 of $380 million.

In a joint statement, the companies said that the purchase of WebEx will support Cisco’s goal of Unified Communication, particularly in the small-to-medium business market.

“Online communication has completely changed the way business is done,” WebEx CEO Subarh S. Iyar said. “Success is no longer based on company size and scale alone, but on speed, agility, and reach. Efficient Web-based communication is critical to succeeding in the new flat-world economy.”

 Yankee Group analyst Zeus Karravala agreed that collaboration is becoming a key part of the online experience. “Younger people are collaborating online in all kinds of different ways,” he said, “using wikis, blogs, video sharing sites, etc. The kinds of tools developed by WebEx are more for the over-40 crowd, but it’s really the same thing — the ability to share content in different media across the Web.”

Karravala said the move was a good one for the network hardware company. “Mostly, unless people really knew the company well, they thought of Cisco as the geeky infrastructure company that made the boxes with the blinking lights in the closet,” Kerravala said. “With this purchase, as well as the recent acquisitions of Five Across and Utah Street, Cisco is becoming much more end-user-relevant.”

The purchases of Five Across and Utah Street Networks, both privately held companies that operate social networking sites, were quietly announced by Cisco earlier this year.

From ZDnet News article:

Sony is finally getting its own virtual reality.

As online virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com and others continue to gain in popularity, Sony on Wednesday unveiled its own version of an immersive 3D social space, known as Home and created exclusively for the PlayStation 3.

At a press briefing in advance of his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference here Wednesday, Phil Harrison, Sony Computer Entertainment’s president of worldwide studios, publicly showed off Home for the first time, explaining how it fits into the PS3 ecosystem and what Sony is calling the “Game 3.0″ era.

Essentially, Home is a 3D, avatar-based social environment available for free to users of the PlayStation 3 network. The idea is to give users a way to connect in a multimedia space and interact with the various forms of media available on the PS3.

Home will be a free download. It will go into a large-scale beta in April and will launch publicly this fall.

While Home has some innovative features–most notably the ability to watch high-definition quality video available through the PS3 network–it’s strongly reminiscent of virtual worlds like Second Life, only deeply scaled back.

Home participants will be able to meet other members, most likely in a main public area known as the “Central Lobby,” and communicate through text, audio or video chatting. They will also be able to pipe in–either in public or private theaters–the latest movies or TV shows available through the PS3 network, as well as their own user-created videos.

Further, users will be able to infinitely customize their avatars. And each member will be given a small (and free) private space, somewhat like an apartment, that he or she can customize per his or her own tastes.

Harrison told CNET News.com that while users will be able to design their own clothing and avatars, as well as other content–be it furniture, vehicles or the like–Sony will moderate anything meant for public spaces, most likely to ensure that Home remains a family friendly space. Content meant for private spaces will not be moderated, he added.

But maintaining such control over content creation means devoting large amounts of time and manpower to the vetting process, and that can translate to a significant delay in the approval of content, as well as minimized user creativity.

Still, Sony may not want Home users to have that much control over what they create.

“In Second Life, it’s all about user-created content,” Harrison said. “We’re providing (a lot of content ourselves). You can only do that with a defined platform…We will deliver what users want in an entertaining way.”

In addition, Harrison said that despite some obvious similarities, Home is not a Second Life knockoff.

“We’ve been working on Home for about two-and-a-half years,” he said. “So we’re absolutely aware of other avatar-based (environments), but we’re taking a different approach.”

He said users would be able to create some forms of their own content, though he did not specify what kinds. He indicated that, like in Second Life, There.com and other virtual worlds, users would be able to conduct transactions in exchange for some form of payment.

That ability has led, in Second Life and There.com, at least, to robust virtual economies that yield real-world profits.

It’s not clear what kind of businesses Home users will be allowed to run, but Harrison did say he could imagine, for example, a user running an interior design business catering to other Home members.

And while it’s evident Sony doesn’t expect Home to be a major cash cow, there are some potential revenue sources.

Those, Harrison said, would include sales of in-world goods; in-world advertising (Home allows for high-quality, realistic advertising); and business-to-business services like sponsorship opportunities.

For its part, Second Life publisher Linden Lab seemed pleased with Sony’s news.

“I think this completely legitimizes our space,” said Catherine Smith, Linden Lab’s director of marketing. “It’s great to see competitors coming in. A couple years ago we were considered crazy” for building a user-created environment. “I think this shows that we’re doing the right thing.”

At its pre-briefing, Sony also unveiled an upcoming PS3 game, LittleBigPlanet, from game studio Media Molecule. The game lets players enjoy a great deal of control over creating game levels, and then playing them.

LittleBigPlanet has some elements of Electronic Arts’ much-anticipated game, Spore, in that players can essentially create the universe in which they play and then watch it evolve.

Sony Playstation 3 press release here

From http://www.pro-g.co.uk :

Commodore Gaming has announced it will launch a new breed of gaming PCs that will see the return of the legendary Commodore brand.

Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it’s been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs.

“25 years ago, Commodore launched the best selling personal computer of the late 20th Century, the C64, and defined the early computer games experience for millions of people worldwide,” said Bala Keilman, CEO for Commodore Gaming. “We are privileged and excited to bring the Commodore brand back to the gaming community and mark a new chapter in its history with this exceptional machine. We’re sure that it will deliver what gamers need and want.”

The new Commodore PCs optimised for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs.

Commodore Gaming is to make further announcements at the launch and promises that there are still some very exciting aspects of the product still to be revealed.

Read about Commodore’s checkered past here

From CNET News:

A new version of Apple’s iTunes software released Monday addresses a number of compatibility issues with Microsoft’s Windows Vista, but a few problems remain.

The updated version supports the upcoming Apple TV product and includes an improved album-sorting feature, but still does not fully support Windows Vista. The new download, iTunes 7.1, is available on Apple’s Web site.

When Vista arrived at the end of January, Apple told Windows users that iTunes was not yet ready for Vista because of compatibility issues. In the most dire scenario outlined by Apple, users could corrupt their iPod simply by plugging it into a Vista PC running iTunes. Problems were also reported with playing back content purchased from the iTunes Store on Vista PCs, Apple said in early February.

The new version fixes several of those issues, but a few outstanding issues remain and Apple is working with Microsoft to finish the job, said Derick Mains, an Apple spokesman.

One problem that needs to be resolved is that ejecting an iPod using the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray could result in a corrupt iPod; Apple recommends that users always eject their iPods within the iTunes software. Also, iTunes is not supported on the 64-bit versions of Vista, and contacts from the Windows Address Book may not sync properly to iPods.