Based on an incomplete quotation published by a reporter for Information Week, the earlier version of this post, before it was updated, drew the conclusion that longtime IBM employee Mark Papermaster was unaware of the former rivalry between IBM and Apple, which is seeking to hire Papermaster.
The complete quotation makes it clear that Papermaster was aware of the early IBM-Apple rivalry.
Posted at 12:11 PM
Correction: An earlier version of this column erroneously stated that GPS satellites send notifications. The SPOT Satellite Messenger uses a GPS system to determine a user’s location and a second satellite network to send notifications.
Posted at 02:01 PM
Clarification from John Paczkowski: In an item posted Nov. 14 about cloned monkey embryos, I jokingly suggested that the Raelians, proprietors of Clonaid–the First Human Cloning Company, were considering establishing a new business called “Macaqaid–the First Monkey Cloning Company.”
Obviously, this is not the case, as the UFO cult’s director of media relations was quick to point out: “The Raelian Movement has not made any announcement regarding a monkey cloning company. … The Raelian Movement is a philosophical movement in strong support of all new technologies, cloning being one of them. However, the Raelian Movement only supports these new technologies from a philosophical/moral point of view and is not involved at all in any enterprise offering services or performing research in these fields.”
We’ll have to disagree with the movement on that last bit there, given Clonaid’s unsubstantiated claims of creating a cloned baby girl and the Food and Drug Administration’s investigation into it.
Posted at 03:11 PM
Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the day Apple will report its quarterly results. The company will do so Oct. 22. (See comment with post.)
Posted at 01:10 PM
Correction: An earlier version of this post had erroneously switched the descriptions of the offerings of BroadClip and Wixi, and had incorrectly assigned MC Hammer’s and Don Dodge’s criticism to Wixi instead of BroadClip. (See comment with post.)
Posted at 02:09 PM
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the first paragraph of this post incorrectly referred to a “2.5-gigabyte” device instead of 2.5G device (as in “generation”) as the author intended. (See comments with post.)
Posted at 02:09 PM
Correction: Due to technical limitations, an individual can’t copy a file larger than four gigabytes in size to a disk drive formatted using the Windows file system called FAT. A previous version of this Mossberg’s Mailbox incorrectly advised that a 25-gigabyte file could be copied to such a disk drive.
Posted at 01:08 PM
UPDATE: Below is an early version of a post that was later updated to include comments and clarification from MediaDefender.
If you’re going to create a honey-pot Web site with which to bust movie pirates, it’s probably not wise to register its domain under the name of your antipiracy company. Otherwise people might think your company is, you know, run by a bunch of idiots.
And some would argue that’s the case with antipiracy solutions provider MediaDefender, which has been outed as the proprietor of a bogus torrent site called MiiVi.com. Launched earlier this year, MiiVi claimed to offer “fast and easy” downloads of first-run movies via a software client. But according to reports, the client’s real purpose was to scan the contents of the hard drives of those who used it for pirated material and report back to MediaDefender.
A sly plan, but one that suffered a great deal in implementation. You see, when MediaDefender registered the MiiVi.com domain in March, it did so under its own name–a Maxwell Smart-ish misstep for an outfit that claims to be the undisputed leader of the peer-to-peer antipiracy industry.
Posted at 04:07 PM