A Groklaw contributor has managed to legally obtain the sealed 1994 settlement between USL (Unix Systems Laboratory) and The Regents of the University of California under the Californian Public Records Law.

It’s a long document, and interesting to note that neither side concedes the others claims, but very interesting in the context that during the case USL conceded that they had distributed the V32 UNIX source files with no copyright notice and the judge pointed out that if he had to rule on it then they were very likely to have lost any copyrights for any material in V32!

Found via Groklaw reporting on a Financial Times story that Micro$oft paid CCIA US$19.75m as part of an anti-trust settlement, and US$9.75m of that ended up in the pocket of their top official and was approved by the CCIA board.

I guess this explains his statement at the time saying “and for important and pragmatic reasons we are choosing to move on with regard to this matter”, I guess almost US$20 million to your organisation counts as a reason to some people. Never mind the principles, smell the money!

This also probably explains Nokia quiting the CCIA in disgust over the settlement. I wonder why Redhat and OSDL are still members ?

If you search Google Scholar for “Vogon” the second link result is Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy which has been cited 107 times.

Beats a lot of science papers.. 🙂

Google seems to have outdone itself, they’re about to launch a new service allowing you to “search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports”.

Basically it’s cool. Very cool.

They not only pull up publications, etc, but also then give you a list of their citations as sub-searches. For instance, if you search for mentions of the book “Nobody Nowhere” by Donna Williams you’ll not only get articles that mention it you’ll also find (for those publications that Google groks the format) a list of articles that have cited it.

Of course, you can also have great fun pulling up searches for friends and places you work, or where you used to work.

You can even find really obscure things, like citations for AberMUD (including one from the Australian Defence Force Academy) or some crusty old physicist.. 🙂

Found via Linux Weekly News, a rather amusing breaking up with Internet Explorer and leaving for Firefox letter..

Dear Internet Explorer:

It’s over. Our relationship just hasn’t been working for a while, and now, this is it. I’m leaving you for another browser.

I know this isn’t a good time–you’re down with yet another virus. I do hope you feel better soon–really, I do–but I, too, have to move on with my life. Fact is, in the entire time I’ve known you, you seem to always have a virus or an occasional worm. You should really see a doctor.

…and it carries on in that vein, very well written.. 🙂

In a Groklaw story about Novell suing Microsoft over Wordperfect I found this interesting comment.

“German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of
SoundForge 4.5 for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can
check that yourself by opening any file in the

$WINNT\Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav

folder in notepad or other editors of
your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to
SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called “Deepz0ne” who happen to be one
of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.”

I’ve just checked this out on an OEM’d XP filesystem that hasn’t been changed since the machine was delivered (I don’t use XP, but I didn’t blow the filesystem away just in case.
As a case in point I can see:

# pwd

/mnt/windows/WINDOWS/Help/Tours/WindowsMediaPlayer/Audio/Wav

# strings wmpaud1.wav | tail

#51O

 6Sr2

$$0,

LISTB

INFOICRD

2000-04-06

IENG

Deepz0ne

ISFT

Sound Forge 4.5

So if PC-Welt's explanation of that is correct, then MS has some explaining to do...

Well after a 2.5 year run at the top of the Top 500 the Earth Simulator has been toppled by not one but two new clusters!

SGI overtook it with a cluster at NASA and has already been doing useful modelling of hurricanes.

But even that beast is dwarfed by IBM’s Blue Gene which has taken the No.1 spot by almost doubling the Earth Simulators Linpack measure of R_max when it’s only part built!

More patent stupidity reported by the Register, apparently Dell are being sued for breaching a patent on automatically working out international shipping charges on a website.

Personally I’d have thought it obvious that if you’re selling things overseas the customer needs to know that this before they commit to paying. Apparently Amazon were doing this well before the patent was filed in 1997 which will be handy prior art.

The following caught my eye when reading the release notes for the preview release of Firefox:

Live Bookmarks

You can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds in your Bookmarks. When you visit a page that advertises a RSS feed by using a tag, a icon will appear in the status bar. Click it to view a list of feeds the page is offering. Click one to subscribe – this adds a Bookmark Folder that contains all the recent posts from the feed.

This of course begs the question, how do you create one of these links ?

The answer is suprisingly easy, the best answer I found (or at least the first useful one :-)) said to do:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”url/to/rss/file”>

So, for my site, it looks like:


<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”backend.php”>


If you’re using the latest Firefox to view my page you should see a little tag in your status bar (normally bottom left) that says which you can click on to subscribe to the RSS feed from this site.

This strikes me as a really useful little hack with HTML and I encourage others who are producing RSS feeds to consider using this!