My Toshiba Thrive's Screen Cracks

Sunday did not start well for my Thrive. I settled down with a cup of coffee to consume some video material, while using a soft cloth to gently wipe down the fingerprints on the screen. Halfway through the video watching my left hand, which was holding the tablet, started to ache. So I switched hands, when I noticed this hairline crack right under where I had just been holding it.

As I was saying, Sunday did not start well for me either.

We obviously went into a tizzy, trying to figure out what went wrong - did we drop it (no), did we crack it against something (no), was there a goblin in the house that goes about cracking LCD screens (no). Until the answer was fairly obvious, the glass cracked as I was holding the tablet one-handed and cleaning screen while watching a video.

Turns out, I was not the only case of this happening. Amazon has an eerily similar story, another dealing with a hairline crack and one with a peel-off LCD. Others have stories of shattered glass after a short drop. ThriveForums.org has this heroic tale of a dropped tablet and it's reincarnation.

Now here is my experience. I called up Toshiba on their customer support number (1-800-457-7777) to see if this would be covered by the standard warranty - No. They suggested I instead contact their out of warranty repair services. Turns out their starting quote for repairing the LCD is $354. Which is about $55 more than what I paid for the tablet.

In summation, the warranty does not cover it, and repairing it costs more than what I paid for the tablet. The obvious choice, I thought, was to kiss the warranty goodbye and do it myself. That is when it started to really stink.

NPD (National Parts Depot) is the parts supplier for Toshiba in the US. At the beginning of the year, they carried the replacement touchscreen and (4) sponges for $82 plus shipping. At some point, Toshiba stopped fulfilling orders for that part, and instead started to just sell the top case assembly for $180 plus shipping.

I get that LCD screens crack. I understand if it is too expensive for Toshiba to repair it for me. But when it feels like Toshiba systematically believes it needs to make money by making cheap parts scarce - it is time to stop encouraging such companies. Sorry guys, no more Toshiba purchases from me. I am just going to use the Thrive as-is and see how long it lasts, while buying exactly diddly-squat worth of accessories.

Thanks for leaving a really bad taste in the mouth.

Pre-installed crud on the Thrive

Now that I've had a bit of time to play with my new fondle-slab, it is time to delve a bit more into what seems to be an odd philosophy from Toshiba in putting together the Thrive. The tablet comes with a near-vanilla version of the Android Honeycomb 3.1 OS, with a few useful Toshiba customizations and utilities. Then there is a curious collection of trial-ware and general crud, topped off with a collection of basic Google mobile goodies. Very little thought seems to have gone into in this - almost as if Toshiba was trying to be recklessly indifferent to its customers.

First the good news - full marks for minimal changes to the stock Honeycomb installation. Keeps the tablet zipping along without additional overhead while keeping the option open for future upgrades (Ice Cream Sandwich anyone?). That said, there aren't too many indications that Toshiba is going to upgrade, unlike Samsung or HTC.

There is then the matter of custom tools that Toshiba built for the occasion. They range from the very useful, like the Service Station and File Manager to the bug-ridden Media Player and the after-thoughts like the App Place and BookPlace™. The App Place is the strangest. It does not offer much more than the Android Marketplace, is not mandatory and yet is an app one cannot uninstall. Clearly as useful as the points system on Who's line is it anyway?.

If Toshiba's app collection is a puzzle, it's third party catalog is a disaster. Outside of the plugins for Adobe® AIR® and Flash, the rest are trial versions of tools that we probably have better, free alternates available for. To add insult to injury, one cannot uninstall them - not even when you buy the full version.

I get that there is an economic reason to include trial versions, but the inability to uninstall is little more than spite. If ever the argument was, “Hey, we think these are must-have apps, so try them out and buy them so we can a cut of the revenue”, there is no sign of it. Instead, the pitch now is, “I don't know or care if you like these apps, but because others have uninstalled them in the past, we are not gonna let you.”. Seems like a rather haphazard way of gaining supporters among your customers. Just try searching for Kaspersky+ Thrive and you can sense the frustration.

Dictating how you want others to use your device is a futile exercise - Apple gets away with it, because they can. Toshiba cannot. So whoever is making the final call on what to include and what not to, remember this - you are not Apple. Don't act like them.

The price of freedom?

Interesting post floating about the last few days, from the blog understatement.com, giving a different spin on the fragmentation issue that has plagued Android phones since the beginning. While iPhones get the OS up to date periodically, Android phones are essentially at the mercy of the carriers and the device manufacturers.

The post outlines the impact of this fragmentation on users, developers and the security of the phone itself.

The biggest impact though, I think, is in actual sales. Selling an outdated phone means you have fewer people who want to now commit to a two-year lock-in. People are still buying the iPhone 3, because they know that it is a phone that is actively being supported by Apple.

And yet, for me, there is another aspect of this that is not obvious from this picture. The world of modified software.

CyanogenMod calls itself an aftermarket firmware for Android phones. Essentially it is a modification of the Android OS, which, unlike the iOS, is Open Source. It provides additional features, not available to stock Android devices. But more importantly, the capability is not forced like with a jail-broken iPhone, but using pieces of the original Android OS itself.

Yes, the fragmentation of the Android market means I am going to delay my purchase till I am sure I am getting a version that is going to last me for at least two years. But it is also the price I am willing to pay - for a device that is actually mine.

At least for now.

Gmail ID - good email ID

When Google got into the business of providing a free email service, I was first in line to get myself an account and play with it. At that time one had to be invited for a gmail account; and being early meant that I got myself a very good email id - a pretty common first name back home.

What I had not realized at the time, was the flip side to having a common email id - the pseudo-spam.

First, there is the 'mistaken' use of my email by folks for all sorts of account activities. I have updates from two bank accounts sent to my email id. There is one broadband and three mobile companies that see fit to remind me of payments due. And at least one kid can probably never get to any online sites because he keeps using my email id for parental consent (that I promptly decline).

Now I have been diligent about trying to let the bank and telecom companies know that their customer does not 'own' my email id. But if a website wants me to log into the account to unsubscribe, there is little I can do about it.

Then there is the the appropriation of my email ID for online activities. I know at least three match-making companies that believe I still need to be hitched. About four universities are waiting for me to register this fall. Some think I have cars to sell, others think I want to buy property. And then the job sites - I have offers from across globe in fields I did not even knew existed. I try to unsubscribe where I can, mark them as SPAM if possible and for the particularly annoying ones I have to go via the forgot password route to log in, change the contact id to abuse@gmail.com and the password to i-am-an-idiot.

Thirdly there are the forward lists I am on. Just because someone knows someone with my first name, they think they can mail me to keep in touch with them. I get baby photos, 'must-forward' emails, jokes and reminders from one school principal that seems to think I am on her staff.

Finally the unsubscribable sites. Horoscopes, yellow page listings, naughty sites and mass-mailing sites - everywhere one does not want to use their own email id. Guess who's easy to remember email ID comes in handy. Yup, mine!

So there you go, first in line with Google, and I get 80% pseudo-spam that gets through Gmail's capable filters. Who would have imagined having a good email ID would be so much work. Maybe I should just have gone with SJPnvTB0HWwhVVo4JFpn@gmail.com

Creative accounting killing creativity

This post is about the broken business models for the music and film industries, and another argument for fundamental reform in the entertainment business. Based on two articles in Techdirt - one dealing with the accounting for Movies (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to be precise) and the other dealing with profit sharing in Music.

Firstly the movies. All movies are set up as a separate company. This company takes all of the film's costs, while giving up 35% of everything the movie makes as fee to the parent studio. So while the studio starts to make a fee off every cent the movie brings in, the movie itself continues to run at a loss unless it is super hit like, say, Avatar. As Planet Money found out, the movie Gone in 60 seconds, that everyone in the world has seen - is losing $212 million. After the break is the leaked income statement for the Harry Potter movie that originally prompted this post.

The music industry follows a similar model. Here instead of the separate movie company, the impacted party is the artist themselves. All costs borne by the artist while 63% of everything the album makes goes to the Record Label before it is offset against the costs. Apparently Courtney Love did a great job breaking down the accounting almost 10 years ago.

There you go - no wonder the MPAA and RIAA can find numerous examples of loss-making movies and albums. It is because they are designed to lose money in the first place.

How LOST it should have been

Yesterday was the big LOST finale. For me and the wife, it was a major let down. She insisted, she needed some closure after the six years worth of episodes. So, well, here is the alternate end to LOST, the way it should have been. Read more after the break.

Frustration

Hola,

Well, the first news is this. I have the domain name anarchius.org with me. You can do a whois on it by clicking here. That will probably give you a lot more information to you than you probably will need :).

The second thing and the thing I am frustrated with is what Verisign has been doing. This is so frustrating to see. I mean, this is the reason why enterprise should be kept away from the Net.

The Internet is probably the biggest collaborative effort by mankind since the development of the language. And even at that this is a bigger effort. When things like a language was developed it needed that the entire community accept and adopt a common standard for communication. This was independent of the use to which the language would be put to use to. We could use languages to communicate history, physics or math. The underlying feature to communication was the language.

The Internet is similar. It by itself means nothing, but a means to communicate. And on top of this structure you have the entire edifice of the email and the WWW which is the content that is being transmitted using the Internet.

This parallel between the Internet and language brings about interesting analogies. Imagine a scenario when language was probably patented. Imagine when you would have to pay someone, or were somehow inhibited from using the letter "I", say. Imagine if suddenly people could not use the word "sorry" and would have to use "hic-hic" because someone decided to change the meaning of the word sorry?

That precisely is the problem with the Internet and the entire fiasco of IPs, and commercial changes to the structure of the Internet. Even when a small but fundamental change is made in a small part of a standalone application, the changes of which would cause a great deal of problems to apparently unconnected parts of the application. Now when a company, for business gain alone, decides to change the fundamental structure of the Internet, which can possibly affect thousands of applications then it is time to do something about it.

Well, I have decided to get frustrated about it, what about you?

~!nrk

Rant time again

Hey, it is back to my favourite activity. Microsoft issued five more security warnings, all at once, at a time when system administrators are still reeling form the effects of MSBlaster. Then hopped over with 5 mod points over to the discussion forum for the article on slashdot. There I found this which accurately describes what I really feel about the issue. Funny, someone made a AC post, and it already had a mod-up. I splurged on it too, though I strictly dont encourage AC posts.

I mean, i seriously dont understand that Microsoft has the nerve to compare its security / performance with something as rag tag as Linux. I dont see why Microsoft should not commit suicide in a drop of water. Look at the start difference between the setups of the biggest computer company in the world and the biggest collaborative setups in the world. One has all the resources in the world to make sure that the software is the best in the world. It has the beta testers which is probably bigger than the installed base of the other. It has the power to seek 'advice' of the best of the best in all fields - usability to security. And then it has the nerve to stand up and say its security is 'just as good'?

lord is watching, he will punish,

~!nrk

Teaching Technology

I dont know why people dont understand technology. Mebbe, it is the same reason people dont like mathematics, or logic or thinking. Because, technology is the closest one can get to naked logic and mathematics.

I guess it is okay, if most of us dont really understand technology, because a great part of technology also carries with it the responsibility of not needing to understand it. Technology is geared to have technically-impaired customers.

But technology needs technically qualified implementors. And technically qualified people dont grow on deciduous trees. Rather they are grown in classroom farms. And the quality of these implementors is directly dependant on the quality of the teacher teaching them.

The teacher forms the jugular vein of the entire cycle of technical resource development. A technically-impaired teacher is probably the worst thing that can happen to cloud the entire cycle of getting technically competent personnel.

Being a teacher is not easy. Being a technical teacher is even more difficult.

A teacher is not one who can merely transfer information to the student. A book can do that. A video can do that. A teacher is not merely an interactive data source either. A website would have been enough. A teacher is a live person, who can talk to a class, raise awareness of the subject in the class, raise interest about the subject in the class and get people to fight and argue about the subject.

The problem with our teaching system is that it is just that - a teaching system. The focus is on teaching, not learning. The focus is on completion of portion and not on the insights into subject. The course structure gains importance over class structure. Content delivery gains precedence over contect acceptance. But the most importantly the difference is in the time limits. A teaching class is complete when the class or course or test is done. A learning class is for life.

Many people have written about the inadequacy about our teaching systems. And to make things better most have identified that interaction is that aspect that is missing from modern schools. Interaction between students to learn from each other, to gain form others insights and to give a rather subtle point which others have missed. In a way, it is like taking the mantle of teaching away from teacher and putting it with each student.

But the method is still teaching. When all is done and the stove grows cold, all that the student is left is with what he has managed to learn. A half baked knowledge of the world around. A confusion of ideas learnt, and ideas idenfied and conflicts between then all.

But no smoldering desire to learn and to know more.

That is the crux of the difference between a teaching class and a learning class. A teaching class teaches. An interactive class betters some, worsens other and teaches a little more. A learning class, ignites a desire to learn, a desire that takes knowledge to beyond classes, courses and exams. That is the way to teach.

And that is what is wrong with teachers in general. But most teachers might get away with it. For knowledge changes at a pace that would not seriously challenge a snail. Hence teaching is not very handicapped by its inability to ignite a learning attitude. But that is where technical teaching is affected. And affected badly.

We are dealing with a rate of information upheaval that would leave the most ardent followers breathless. A technical subject is having its bases and roots rapidly obsoleted and wasted and revised. Such is the pace of change that teaching would not really teach anything. There is only one way of teaching and that is a learning class.

But that is where most of today's technical teachers lack.

A technical teacher needs to love technology. And get other to feel passionately about it.

The teacher needs to understand technology, not just a concept, but the core. Needs to be friendly enough with technology to be able to introduce it as a friend to any audience. The teacher needs to realized that implementation does not matter, what matters is the core concepts. And understand these concepts.

A teacher needs to be able to get the students interested in technology, not just in how to work it or even in how it works. But the interest should spread and encompass the idea, the implementation and form a seed for new and unheard of solutions.

And a teacher needs to be able to enthuse not just technologists but every lay man to understand and love technology.

That is what we need form a technical teacher.

That is what we lack in a technical teacher.

We have technologists who love technology. We may have some teachers, who can make students learn. When will we have a technologist teacher?

blogging is blogging, writing is writing, don't confuse the twain

~!nrk

And more does

I know I cannot make those long posts anymore.

That is because, I sit in this corporate outfit, and I have to be all corporat-ish. So God help me.

Well, I had to write this. So I remembered this. I am in corporate, but I still /. and google.news a lot. In the technology section, I found this article.

I dont know if you have been reading the news recently, but the Blaster worm has been doing the rounds. And then they "caught" this blaster worm writer. A script kiddie. An 18 year old who is just spending some spare times, grepping old scripts to change strings and replace then with his own names. And do you know what they called him?

Mr McKay would not elaborate beyond the allegations against Mr Parson, but said, "Is he dangerous? Yes, he's dangerous. ... There is serious harm to individuals, businesses, Microsoft Corp. being only one of them."

Oh my gawd. Gimme a break. I mean, they say the same thing against everyone. He is a dangerous deranged criminal. He is the reason I am going to miss my profit targets. Big valuations of possible problems, and then big flashes of photographers in the press conference.

I dont know if you know about another guy called Kevin Mitnick. I think i wrote about him earlier. The same with him too. I can understand the desperation of the media for these poor script kiddies. I so feel sorry for them. Most of the bigger fish are probably doing all they want to do, and making sure neither the media not the courts find anything against them. And then there are these kids, who know a little, have an attitude and in the end be those who have take the fall.

And to top it all, people act as if they were the persons to cause the trouble to begin with. The article acts as if 18 year old script |<1dd133 is the bad person and Microsoft is the victim!! How pathetic can journalism get.

I dont know if journalists will ever look beyond the obvious and reach out for the truth. And I hope that one day, people will understand the difference between hackers, crackers, virus authors and script kiddies. And one day, I hope, Microsoft is secure enough that script kiddies are mere kids and unable to cause 7.7 million dollar worth of trouble.

No, let me change that. And one day, I hope, there wont be enough of M$ left for script kiddies to do 7.7 million dollar worth of trouble.

Amen to that.

warm regards,

~!nrk

Time passes

Yeah, it does. Coz the last time I wrote that last thing, called woot, I was a student. Sitting away, tucked in some obscure corner of the world, in a place called Calcutta, having absolutely nothing to do, and no one to think about but myself.
Now, I am sitting far away.

Really far away. Farther than the biggest stretch of my imagination.
I am in Bangkok right now. In the JW Marriott hotel. In one of their biggest conference rooms. Listening to yet another talk about something that I had spent a lot of time learning about. This is strange. Once upon a time, I spent money and time to learn all this. Now I am being paid to sit through this class, and I don't even need it. Life does come a complete circle.

Oh, I have a laptop now. But yeah, it is not mine. Not loaned, but kind of owned corporately. And this is from the corporate network. So don't really know if people will be happy with this. But then, I frankly believe that this is a better utilization of my time as opposed to trying to listen to the class today. There is nothing to listen to.

As I was telling you, I have this laptop now. And the moment I got it, I wanted to move from my desktop to this. Which essentially meant that I wanted to install all the programs I had in my old desktop onto this machine and move over all my data files to this machine.

Then I got the shock of my life. They told me that all I could use was the core-load software. Nice term that - core load. But that really put the shackles on me. I could understand it in a way. They did not want any pirated software on the computer. Made sense. Obviously corporates dont really want to have pirated stuff on their assets, coz it might turn out to be painful for them in the future. Completely understandable.

Then I wanted to install at least my open source software on it. My openoffice.org for example, so that I could at least edit my stuff in that format. The answer to my astonishment was "no". I was not allowed to load any of this software at all. All I could use was the MS products, for which I had licenses via the corporate route and nothing else.

No shareware, probably makes sense. Coz there might be license issues.

Unnecessary small testing of programs also makes sense. Coz there might be an security and malware issues.

But what does not make sense is why no OOo? Is OOo not different from a free mario clone on the web?

Dont corporates distinguish between them?

What if I had a problem with the machine and I could just use a free software off the web and set it right? Can I not do it?

How does corporate handle different kinds of software. Is it always this fearful and afraid of non MS products? Or probably something which they had not paid for?

When will open products get corporate acceptability?

Gawd only help me find those answers. Or mebbe slashdot can...

sweet lord

~!nrk

Uh..Huh?

Basically was caught up the last few days. So did not post. Ah! well, that must be obvious. I mean there is little precious that can happen right? Well so here I am back after the break, with a bang.

Okay.. i found this comfortable position for the keyboard by keeping it in my lap. And believe me it is really good considering that I dont have proper furniture for working on the computer. And it does show. I mean, i have been feeling my hands go numb after typing non stop for a long time. And my speed also gets affected. And this position is really good as I can type fast and at the same time I really dont see my hands paining. It is really a win-win.

Dont know why I am rambling like this, but basically I just love the way I can type fast. And I just saw swordfish. Okay, I really dont know how people can buy all this hacking bull shit. It is almost as if people write authentication code in standard html and expect every system to give one of two messages...
If (1) then the printf("Access Granted",green) else printf("Access Denied",red);
Almost pathetic how cinema can make people believe a lot of stuff. Just like timelines for a lot of other stuff gets compressed in the world of cinema, the timelines for hacking, security, for carefully laid systems all get compressed into a few taps of the keyboard. I know I will live to one day see "offline backup systems" being hacked using satellite technology. That day I will sleep in peace.

So what do I write about? There is a lot to be written, but dont really have the enthusiasm for that now. So I will call it a day now and retire, hoping for a better morning.

Bubbly bubbly bye...

~!nrk

Security?

"Typically with these types of issues it will be six to nine months until we see a massive attempt to start exploiting it," Cooper said, adding that a preemptive patch was critical.

This is from an article, that discusses yet another *sigh* security disclosure by MicroSoft. It is incredible, what this guys cannot do. I mean they teach you this at school. "How-to-code-sensibly-101". And these guys come up with pathetic code, time after time. They are simply amazing. I never knew they had so much of code which could give rise to so many critical bugs.

But that is more irrevelant. What i felt more about was the above statement by Russ Cooper, head of security at TruSecure Corp. What a hell load of crap. How long does it take for a CR4c|<3r to take a vulnerability and mount an attack you said? 6-9 months. WOW. get real. I'd say something like 6-9 hours is more like it. Does the guy know anything about the current state of security? Mebbe he ought to read of a project called the honeynet. Ask them. The script kiddies take that long to get easy to use GUI tools to launch attacks. Not crackers. Atleast not the talented ones.

The only thing we can bank on is that no one does serious work on Office anyway, so it does not matter what crackers do. Yah I was just joking. There is no solace. Those people at Redmond keep churning bad code. These guys at security agencies keep tracking them. Those people keep playing down the seriousness. And cracking continues to be done by kids with ready to use tools. It is sad. Wonder what happened to M$'s trust initiative. Remember sometime back, Bill Gates asked all his programmers to stop coding and sit around fixing bugs. Wow, I mean look at the nerve of the guy. He produces sloppy code, then he is under pressure and asks his own programmers to do what they were supposed to do better, and gets mileage out of it, and establishes M$ as a security focused company because of his initiatives. Simply, pathetic.

Have my end terms starting from next week. Sad. I have eight subjects and five days. Lets see how it goes.

50 10n6 & 7|-|4nk5 f0R h4x0R-5p34|<
~!nrk

Why I don't trust Microsoft: 'smart tags'

A rant on Microsoft, about their smart tags.

Edit: As it turns out, the annoyances of these smart tags have not entirely gone away, only morphed into a cross-browser technology. The difference is that now they are under the webmaster's control and generating income for them.

What follows is not my article. The real author's name is given below. I got this in a mail from our local LUG. Just put it up so that i could refer others to this. If anyone knows the trus source of the article please write to me. I will be more than glad to put up a credit.

Now Microsoft has come along with a "brilliant" idea. They want to piggyback their own selected content on top of your work. The idea is to have their products (such as Internet Explorer and the Office suite) scan web pages and documents for keywords and phrases known to the Microsoft. Any of these that are found would be underlined with a special purple "squiggle" to show that they are "smart tags".

Anyone viewing the page could then click on the smart tag and be transported to a Microsoft web site for more information. For example, you could write a web page about the Grand Canyon, and the phrase "Grand Canyon" could be underlined, allowing your visitors to check out the Expedia.Com page about how to book travel to the area.

Why does Microsoft want to do this? It's really very simple - to make an incredible amount of money. Look at it this way, Microsoft suddenly would have at their disposal every single document viewed with a new Microsoft product as a potential advertisement. Wow. That's power. No, this is an understatement of incredible magnitude. This is more than power - this is the harnessing of everyone's creative energy into a huge global advertising tool. It totally staggers the imagination.

You could be looking at a newspaper site, reading an article about train travel, and click on numerous links to Microsoft sites (and presumably third party sites which paid Microsoft for the privilege) selling train related products and services. If you read a classified ad on that same newspaper site selling an automobile, the word "Cadillac" could be underlined with a smart tag linking to a Cadillac dealer.

Content (the tags) are added dynamically to web pages by the browser without the permission of the person who created the pages (the webmaster or author). While strictly speaking this might not violate copyright laws (but it might be considered vandalism), it sure is rude. In fact, most people would consider it highly unethical.

As an example, suppose you bought a book through a book club. Before it was shipped to you, someone opened the book and examined every single page, adding comments here and there about how you could purchase this or get more information about that. You would be very annoyed if you were the author, you'd probably be livid if you were the publisher of the book, and you'd almost certainly return it if you were the customer.

Carefully crafted web pages whose look and feel has been lovingly built for countless hours by dedicated designers, authors, artists and webmasters would be randomly covered with trash by a company intent on siphoning away visitors to their own sites and pages.

And what about the problem of inappropriate content? Suppose you had a site which was against animal cruelty, yet Smart Tags went ahead and added to your pages links to other sites which sold muzzles for horses? You wouldn't like that very much, would you?

Another problem is that Smart Tags are "opt-out". This means the tags are inserted unless you (the webmaster or the user) indicate that you do not want them. Opt-Out is the preferred method of removal for many advertisers because they understand that most people will not bother to remove themselves from the list. Opt-in is the preferred method of most consumers because then they receive only what they have requested.

Webmasters can keep smart tags from working on their site by including a special "opt-out" metatag in the header of each and every page. I highly recommend that all webmasters include this tag to prevent smart tags from operating.

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

As soon as Smart Tags appeared in a beta release of Windows XP, the furor began. It was awesome to see. Microsoft was hit from all sides by just about everyone, because their intentions were so transparent and so blatantly monopolistic that even the most conservative could see what they were up to. The dangers caused a flood of protests to be received by the giant company, so many that Microsoft was forced to remove the feature from their products.

"As a result of smart tags in beta versions of Windows XP and IE, we received lots of feedback, and have realized that there is a need to better balance the user experience with the legitimate concerns of content providers and web sites," Microsoft said in a statement on June 28th, 2001.

Keep an eye on Microsoft, however, because they also added, "Microsoft remains committed to this type of technology, and will work closely with content providers and partners in the industry in the coming months to further refine how it can be used."

by Richard Lowe Jr.

Document Changes:
August 23, 2001: First version published