From the manufacturer's website:

So, now we are measuring dreams in XBoxen?

Whoosh!

With any luck, their first pair of shoes will provide a real kickstart.

For those too lazy to go RTFA, here is the actual text of the warning label:

"Remove Before Use This device is capable of determining its (and your) physical, geographical location and can associate this location data with other customer information. To limit access to location information by others, refer to the User Guide for Location settings and be cautious when downloading, accessing or using applications and services."

Dry, but straightforward.

15 Stupidest Warning Labels: http://www.oddee.com/item_88437.aspx

These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.

Uhm, here's a bunch of code we wrote that is mostly useless to us. Let's bestow it on the unwashed masses and see if they can make it useful.

The company has to first make sure that each of the technologies will really be useful and provide significant value outside Yahoo, before releasing it to open source, Chaiken said. It takes time and effort to go through the open source process, and to build a community around open source, so the company has to first make sure there will be interest from developers, he added.

Let's float some new stories to some techie sites to see if anyone would like to fix our stuff for free.

Releasing technology to the open source community helps Yahoo build recognition and a technical brand in the technical community, and also develop relationships with universities and companies, Chaiken said. There could also be some financial benefits in getting community developers to work on a project, he added.

We love free labor.


In all seriousness, this article seems like a non-story to me. Some huge corp is releasing stuff that they don't find very valuable in an attempt to see if someone out there can make it valuable for free. I'd be a whole lot more interested if they were releasing something that was already a technological breakthrough. Using the open source community as your free labor drones just feels wrong.

Looks like according to de Icaza 2011 still won't be the year of the Linux Desktop.

It's probably due to some contract thing - but imagine how many fewer annoying articles about SCO and Darl would have been avoided had this guy gone public years ago.

I'm still confused about the word "Assault" in this title... if they are assaulting with MS Office - whom are they assaulting? The only other decent real-time distributed document editing system that is worth using is google docs. Why would Google partner up with MS to assault... Google?

I'm still amazed at the stranglehold that MS Office maintains - I've not owned or used a copy of Office in more than 10 years. Plenty of alternatives exist, and they work great.