A school in the UK has sent a letter to parents telling them that they are not welcome at the upcoming Sports Day at the school. An article from BBC News indicates that the headmistress claims that having the parents standing by can be embarrassing for the students and may …
In an interesting analogy, PeopleSoft's president and CEO Craig Conway has compared Microsoft's .NET technology to the naturally-occurring substance that seemed to be a very promising heat shield and insulator until it was found to cause severe lung trouble and was labeled one of the more toxic substances that …
It didn't take long for people to start writing editorials about the Microsoft-SCO connection in trying to get you to stop using OpenSource software. Check out the article from CNET.
Cloudmark, makers of a hot anti-spam product have announced that they are finally starting to charge a monthly fee for their service. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, especially as a product goes from beta to final release. However, testers and the media claim (as in this article from CNET …
NASA's TetrUSS fluid dynamics simulation software is now released for the Macintosh. Even if you aren't interested in the package itself, the comments on "Why MacOS X?" are nice to see.
In an effort to fight fraud, banks in the UK are rolling out a pilot program to defeat credit card cloning (where you make a copy of the credit card by duplicating the data on the back of the card) through the use of an electronic chip that verifies a …
There is an excellent and extensively researched article on photographic preservation on the Washington Post. It covers everything from the why's and wherefore's of photographic preservation to Bill Gates' private photo archive at Corbis (which you can use if you pay for the rights).
An article from the New York Times relates that there is concern in the library and archive community that the DMCA may prevent the preservation of such historically important software as VisiCalc. Because of "bit rot", the disks containing the original software are becoming unusable, but archivists are hesitant to …
It's official. A press release on the Roxio site indicates that they have purchased PressPlay from Sony and Universal Music for a $12.5 million in cash and 3.9 in stock. In addition, the company plans to pour at least $20 million into the venture just to get it …
An article on USA Today describes the efforts of hackers to use an XBox as the basis of a PC and describes the costs, potential benefits, and legal risks.
According to an article from CNET, the first quarter of 2003 saw an increase of over two million users with broadband. Most (1.2 million) went to cable, but the healthy remainder are now using DSL. The article further states that of the 87 million people within the reach of …
Tadpole, long-time purveyor of Solaris-running Sparc-based laptops, has decided to try competing directly with lower price offerings. According to an article on CNET, the company has released an under-$3000 model as part of its new line- up.
In a move that is undoubtedly intended to bolster the copyright claims of SCO, Microsoft Sunday announced that they will be licensing the remnants of AT&T's original Unix from SCO. As reported by CNET, this is the next salvo in the war between Microsoft and the Linux community …
An article in CNET reports that there is a patent lawsuit brewing over challenge-response anti-spam software. The good news is that there is a lot of prior art, and the folks who have it (including Brad Templeton, early chariman of the EFF] ) are very willing to help in the lawsuits …
A nice development for diabetics who require close monitoring and insulin. According to an article on Wired, this year's MIT prize for Entrepreneurship goes to a team who developed a once daily injection that will release insulin based on need as opposed to time or all at once.