An interesting article on CBS Markecensoredch discusses the potential plight of technology companies that cut their R&D investments in bad times, likening it to the auto industry decline in the 1970's. The article is a bit alarmist, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Dell Computer is now releasing the Inspiron 8500 complete with the display I want to see on a future Mac laptop, a 1920x1200 pixel wide-aspect 15.4" display. Lots of pixels! Of course, it's a PC, so I won't have any of it, but some of you folks may find …

People who are conversant with UNIX won't be that surprised about this, but there certainly are some strange places to find "Switcher" ads on the 'net. This morning, on Slashdot, I found a pointer to this commentary. Much to my surprise, it's not some magazine press release or some such …

I spent the first day of the GDC in a tutorial given by members of the Sony Online and AE teams about "Running Massively Multiplayer Games". The class was attended by about 70 people, most of whom were in the process of developing or releasing an MMO. The class itself …

An article in the New York Times is touting the Maine statewide laptop program as a success so far. Maine began the program a year ago with an agreement for Apple to provide thousands of laptops each year so that 7th and 8th graders throughout Maine could have laptops as …

Although this news is slightly dated (a bit over a week now), I only heard about it yesterday. Motor City Online has been axed effective the end of August. For those unfamiliar, the game is a Massively Multiplayer Online(MMO) car racing game, where players race to win money, to …

So, I understand from this article that Free Space Optics (FSO) have been around for a while, but this is the first that I'd heard of it, and the technology is cool. Basically, PowerBeat International provides high speed data (400Mbps+) over visible light spectrum. That's right, no licenses to procure …

"Actually, sir. There's a server in your fly," says the waiter. Somebody with clearly too much time on their hands has decided it would be a good time to take advantage of the existence of web server-capable chips smaller than the size of a standard housefly. To that end, he …

So far, so good, for the new Department of Homeland Security (despite the fact that I, personally, still hate the name). According to an article on CNet, they have been credited with doing a good job responding to the recent Sendmail vulnerability, including detection and coordination with private organizations to …

According to an article in Wired, Sony will be making the blue laser DVD recorders available (including built-in tuner) on April 10th in Japan. The recorder will be able to store two hours of HD video, giving it a substantial increase in capacity over the current red-laser DVDs. Any of …

Not that this is a surprise, but Microsoft is abandoning its seat on the OpenGL Architecture Review Board(ARB). Also not surprisingly, they are doing so as to "focus our energies on improving and evolving our own Windows graphics platform." In other words, they've learned enough from the standard and …

Apple Computer has released the March 2003 security update for MacOS X. As usual, it fixes a number of security issues, including the recently discussed SSL man-in-the-middle and the Sendmail bug discussed by the new Homeland Security department.

According to an article on BBC News, China has announced plans to establish a mining base on the moon by 2010 in order to "exploit the mineral resources" of our satellite.

Presumedly because of the coverage of the new G3 announcement earlier today, O2 (who have implemented G3 on the Isle of Man) got some press from the BBC about a project that provides internet access to some 20-odd Macintoshes installed in a school bus via a single G3 mobile phone …

In an amusing twist, the folks at Lindows have asked for hundreds of boxes of evidence from Microsoft which that company had used to extricate itself from a nasty copyright dispute with Apple. Apparently, the hope is that the evidence, which was compelling enough to keep Microsoft from having to …

Check out Icon Wars. It's a cool little flash movie. Make sure your sound is turned on.

In the first announcement in the UK, Hutchison 3 has announced that their network is live and that they expect to begin providing service by March 15, according to an article on BBC News. 3G is the next generation of wireless telephone technology that provides true high-speed communications (at speeds …

According to an article on CNN, China is planning a trip to the moon that could commence less than three years from now.

Intel, the huge microprocessor manufacturer, has released a paper about the Open Runtime Platform, a new execution environment. The trick here is that it is designed to be a high-performance platform for running other transportable platforms, like Java's JVM and Microsoft .Net's CLI, on multiple platforms (Intel-based, of course), including …

According to an article from Mainichi Interactive, domestic Air Traffic Control in Japan delayed many flights for a period of 54 minutes while a computer "glitch" that caused flight information to disappear from ATC screens. The planes themselves didn't disappear, so there was little concern over safety, but as a …