diegocgteleline.es writes "After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, and variable process argument length. SLUB is now the default slab allocator, there's SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support. Also the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers, and many other minor features and fixes. See the changelog for details."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As per the rumors circulating for just a few days, activist investors, and disgruntled shareholders have ousted Sprint CEO Gary Forsee. There are three main reasons for the ouster -- and not all of them make sense.

1. Sprint has a relatively high churn rate among the majors, and is acquiring new customers much more slowly than chief wireless rivals AT&T and Verizon. For the next quarter, Sprint has issued guidance that they will suffer a net loss of over 300k subscribers, which is atrocious in a time when AT&T and VZW are net adding about 1.5M each. There seems to be no resonating marketing message, and the brand is suffering.
   
   My take: This is a problem that can be blamed on Sprint management and marketing execs, and possibly right up to Forsee. Sprint needs to find a message that resonates with customers, stick to it, and rebuild the brand. Realistically, their service is scarcely better or worse than the other oligopilists, but the perception is that it is worse.



2. The Nextel merger is not going as well as expected, with delays in integration, and frustration and churn among Nextel's formerly loyal blue-collar Push-to-talk (PTT) base. Prior to acquisition, Nextel was the goose that laid golden eggs, with ~$70 ARPU, but that goose is plucked.
   
   My take: The roots of this problem stem from the "Nextel Spectrum Swap" that was in motion long before Sprint stepped in. Nextel is vacating spectrum that it promised not to use because it was interfering with Public Safety radios in the 800MHz band. As it vacates, existing Nextel users are getting crammed into a smaller band, and quality is suffering. The only cure is to speed up the rollout of EV-DO Rev.A, and get Nextel users migrated to PTT services over CDMA. Sprint is showing every sign of doing this, so is there any executive culpability? Perhaps the Nextel merger was simply ill-conceived, and overpriced.



3. Investors are not thrilled about Zohm, Sprint's big venture into WiMAX service at 2.5GHz.
   
   My take: This is a serious fundamental disconnect between investors and management. The Zohm effort is something I earlier described as follows: "Sprint's 2.5GHz strategy is tied in my mind for "gutsiest US telco project" with Verizon's FIOS project. If Sprint succeeds, they will have a sustainable advantage that their competitors cannot easily copy (for lack of spectrum)."
   
   The disconnect is that investors in Sprint are risk-averse, Blue-chip, dividend seekers. They invested in Sprint when it was a utility company. But Sprint's "gambit" into WiMAX has taken them way out of the "utility company" comfort zone -- and the reaction of the investors is as expected. With Zohm, Sprint's risk profile is looking more and more like a big tech firm, say Yahoo or Apple. Today's Sprint needs risk-seeking investors, not fixed-income seekers. Of course, the result is that Sprint is churning investors faster than it churns subscribers. And it's easier to lose old investors than to gather new ones.
   
   Perhaps existing investors would rather see Sprint sell off its 2500MHz spectrum to some VC, private equity-backed group that could take the risk, and pay a dividend to shareholders. But that doesn't make sense. It's exciting to finally see a telco do something bold, take risks, and...yes...even get a bit desperate. Because it is in desperation that the telco will break ranks and do radical things, like give the customer what it wants. Zohm promises no long contracts, open-access to any compatible device, ample bandwidth, and reasonable and varied pricing plans. Damn, does that sound like a breath of fresh air! Techdirt is firmly in the camp that so doing, a telco would actually INCREASE the value of their products, and grow profits.

By no means is Zohm a slam dunk. WiMAX is, as yet, largely unproven. Timing is essential, and any significant delays will reduce the Sprint advantage. But an early success would radically change the wireless landscape, and could not be readily copied by competitors. In Sprint, we have the best of the capitalist system, where the effort could succeed or fail, but in pushing the envelope by merely entering the race, things are better for all consumers. Forsee or not, I hope Zohm lives on.

Can you imagine adding fun, targeted video content to your site, while earning revenue at the same time? No, really. Picture the majesty, the drama, the undeniable spectacle of it all. Video. Your site. Total togetherness. It's a dreamlike state.

Whoa, snap out of it! This video-makes-money-on-your-site thing is now a solid reality. Google AdSense announced today a new offering called video units. Video units let website publishers choose relevant content from select YouTube partners and have it streamed to their sites within a highly customizable video player. The videos are supported with user-friendly, targeted advertising, both above the video content and within the bottom 20% of the viewing area. Video units are now available in the U.S. for English language websites that are signed up for an AdSense account.

If you want to learn more and see a sample video unit, you can check out the AdSense blog. If you're ready to get started, sign in to your AdSense account. You'll need to sign up for AdSense to take advantage of this new service.

Happy viewing!

This post has been brought to you by Ryan Hayward, aspiring blogger and Product Marketing Manager for Google AdSense.

Damon Tog notes a Wired blog posting featuring quotes from a juror who took part in the recent RIAA trial. Some excerpts: "She should have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars... Spoofing? We're thinking, "Oh my God, you got to be kidding."... She lied. There was no defense. Her defense sucked... I think she thought a jury from Duluth would be naive. We're not that stupid up here. I don't know what the fuck she was thinking, to tell you the truth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anyone have a circa 1993 copy of Computer Shopper magazine/catalog out there? You might want to open to any random old page and see who Gateway is going to merge with next. Back in August, Acer announced plans to buy Gateway -- and while the announcement included some info about intentions to also roll Packard Bell into the deal, that part of the deal has only just been confirmed. Basically, Acer is giving Gateway the money to buy Packard Bell, which will then be included in the Acer acquisition. Of course, Gateway also bought eMachines a few years back, though that's one company that didn't exist back in the 1993 Computer Shopper era. However, if you do remember Computer Shopper in those days, it was dominated by ads from these companies, along with Dell and Micron. Are there still any other mostly forgotten also-ran PC makers from the early 90's that are available for the new Acer/Gateway/PackardBell to buy?

Steve McLaughlin took all the UK Beatles LPs and compressed them into a single, 1-hour MP3 by increasing their tempo by 800 percent. The resulting file is a little hard to listen to, but it's an impressive accomplishment, nevertheless. I'm up to "Hard Day's Night," and it's starting to cause hallucinations. Link (Thanks, Hendrik!)

A UK band called Batch Totem has released a 74-minute album compressed down to fit on a 1.4MB, 3.5" floppy disk. Who need vinyl nostalgia?

"Trunkeret & Ikonisk" by Batch Totem (an alias for musician, Jonas Olesen) consists of 19 tracks, which are heavily compressed in the GSM 6.10 WAV format, at various bitrates. The album is on the Ristretto label, and can be bought online with PayPal.

"The idea is essentially to release an album on an almost obsolete medium that fits very well with the music on an aesthetical level," says Olesen. "Secondly, the scope of the project is to use heavy compression as a feature that shapes the music, instead of a limitation that reduces sound quality."

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Last night while way too jetlagged I decided to add a feature that accumulates all the pictures that TwitterGram flows from Flickr to Twitter. Apparently I got away with it. Here they are...

http://www.twittergram.com/picstream

Obviously some more work is needed, but it's already a fun way to get an idea of who's using TwitterGram and what their lives are like.

Thanks to the Flickr API and the Twitter API.

Bing!

An update on the new album from Radiohead, "In Rainbows," which will be available via download starting at midnight tonight: it's absolutely DRM-free, according to an announcement today on the band's website. Now, I know I wasn't the only one who had problems actually ordering and paying for the tracks, and there's been much griping around the web about problems with their online store... all is forgiveable, IMO, with this news. You gotta give these guys credit for making this move. They're not the only band selling DRM-free music online, direct to fans, but FSM knows they're the biggest. And this move matters. Link

(Thanks, Camille, also spotted at sharealike and elsewhere.)

Previously: Radiohead lets fans pick price for new album

Iconic punk t-shirts redone in Arabic, by 26-year-old graphic artist Brendan Donnelly. Remixed logos from Black Flag, Joy Division (shown here), Velvet Underground, the Ramones, and others, all translated into Arabic. Link to Style.com article (Thanks, Susannah Breslin).

Wired News defense technology blogger Noah Shachtman tells Boing Boing,

For years, the private terror-hunters at the SITE Institute have been infiltrating jihadist chat rooms, and spying on the extremists congregating online.  Now, the group its digital cover has been blown -- and Al-Qaeda online communications channels have gone dark -- thanks to a ham-handed move by the Bush administration, it seems.  "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," SITE's Rita Katz told the Washington Post.

Link, and see this related post from Noah about apparent plans by the US Air force to initiate "offensive cyber strikes": Link.

Three years ago, we discussed the possibility that Wal-Mart could eventually enter the broadband business. At the time, the discussion was around Wal-Mart using its massive network of stores to act as WiMax access points, coating much of the nation with wireless internet access. The idea didn't seem likely for a variety of reasons, and with the news that Wal-Mart actually is entering the broadband space, we can easily see why the WiMax plan never made sense for Wal-Mart. Rather than taking the route suggested three years ago, Wal-Mart is simply partnering with Hughes to resell satellite broadband access. As many people know, satellite broadband access is the last refuge for the broadband addict who simply has no other choice. The speeds aren't great, the latency is a huge pain, and the reliability is often a problem. So, there are already some hurdles to overcome. Second, unlike the original suggestion, Wal-Mart appears to have nothing to do with the offering, other than slapping its brand on it (and even then it's not entirely clear from the article how the service will be branded). That means that Wal-Mart won't be able to have much say in how the service is run. Even if the stories of Wal-Mart losing its technology edge are overrated, this deal is going to involve existing infrastructure and existing service models -- meaning that it won't shake up the industry very much at all. Basically, what was envisioned three years back was Wal-Mart routing around other providers and offering up something entirely new, which it could control. Three years later, the best the company can do is piggyback its brand on a weak legacy offering. That's hardly going to shake up the industry.

Da Massive writes in with a link to a story on KOffice 2.0, the next generation of the KDE office suite due sometime next year. In an interview with KDE spokesman Sebastian Kugler, Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice. It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool. KOffice is not yet fully compatible with ODF but the claim is that 2.0 will be.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting story about the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan a couple of weeks ago. According to the Austin American Statesman, this plane has previously flown to Guantanamo Bay, which has a highly restricted airspace:

Some news reports have linked the plane to the transport of terrorist suspects to the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but those reports cite logs that indicate only that the plane flew twice between Washington and Guantánamo and once between Oxford, Conn., and Guantánamo.

No terrorist suspects are known to have been transferred to Guantánamo directly from the United States.

The jet, with the tail number N987SA, changed hands twice in recent weeks. But how it ended up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers remains a mystery.

The Mexican attorney general's office said the blue and white Gulfstream II crashed Monday in a remote jungle area on the Yucatán Peninsula. Authorities seized 132 bags of cocaine weighing four tons.

Mad Cow Morning News visited the owners of the plane, “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” of Coconut Beach FL., and discovered that it's an "empty office suite with a blank sign out front."

There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at the Florida Dept. of Corporations, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL.

However, there were, oddly enough, a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.

Phone calls to Butters Development, the industrial park's leasing agent, went unreturned.

Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page, apparently designed to “flesh out the ghost a little,” is such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeats the purpose of helping aid the construction of a plausible “legend,” or cover, and ends up doing more harm than good...

For example, the website features a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer. Unfortunately his name is “John Doe.” And the listed phone number is right out of the movies: 415.555-5555.

Link

On Friday, vandals destroyed seven photographs by Andres Serrano hanging in a southern Sweden art gallery. Apparently, they brought along someone to videotape the attack. The video, annotated with commentary and set to a heavy metal soundtrack, is now on YouTube. Police suspect that the vandals are part of a neo-Nazi group in the area. The video describes them as "national socialists." Serrano is best known for Piss Christ (1989), a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of his urine.

From the New York Times:

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints...

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals went to the black room, where (show curator Viveca) Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit racier.

Link to NY Times article, Link to YouTube video (NSFW)

James Glover says:

Kwik-Fit, a British chain of car-repair garages, has been taken to court by the Performing Rights Society for "public performances" of music played on staff radios.

The PRS claimed that Kwik-Fit mechanics routinely use personal radios while working at service centres across the UK and that music, protected by copyright, could be heard by colleagues and customers.

It is not entirely clear is the term radio is used to refer to broadcast radio stations or to CDs/Tapes payed on audio equipment. Either way this seems a ridiculous abuse of public performance licenses.

Link

GM continues to expand the features of its popular OnStar system with a new service that's been talked about for years, that would allow the company to automatically stop a stolen car remotely. The last time we spoke about such a concept, it was four years ago -- and there were a lot of people worried about the idea. However, that may have been because it was the po