Anyone who can remember the anti-trust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Microsoft (and I know that, since nothing really came of it, we can forget that it ever happened or that Microsoft was actually convicted of anti-trust and illegally obtaining and abusing their monopoly) will recognize the Bill Gates we see in a pair of interviews he gave recently.

Gates taking a seat in your den (News.com) is a longer one (four pages), in which he shows off his unique interviewing style in which a... [More]

The MacWorld Expo has come and gone. Steve Jobs has demoed OS X Tiger once again and there are neat animations of some of the cooler features coming this year (second quarter 2005) to a Mac near you. I thought three of these were particularly interesting.

Dashboard

The OS X Dashboard (click ‘Play here now’ in the desktop picture shown near the top of the page) “is home to a new kind of application called widgets”. There are a ton of these widgets, for checking weather, converting units,... [More]

Scraping and ad-stripping Google’s results is an explanation/manifesto explaining why they offer open-source code for scraping the Google search results pages.

“If done in the public interest and not for profit, it’s legal. What’s more, Google can’t block you if they can’t find you.”

Their basic point is that Google has built a $50 Billion market cap simply by trawling the Internet for content you’ve created, attaching ads to it and serving it all up in super-context-sensitive search results.... [More]

I once had a conversation in an Opera forum with another user about document standards, validating web sites and browser support/detection. His opening salvo was as follows:

“Coding to make your site break for 8% of your visitors is definitely stupid, whether you do it because of ignorance or evil is irrelevant. Sites that require MSIE pretty much never validate, and obviously you can’t even start thinking of incompatibilities between IE6 and IE5 before you have checked that your code is valid.... [More]”

It sounds like a venereal disease when you say it like that.

Whereas your health is not endangered by Windows XP (yet!), the latest numbers from security services around the world are out and they agree that:

“[20 minutes is] how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP will last once it’s connected to the Internet … before it’s compromised and effectively 0\/\/n3d.”

Infected in 20 minutes (The Register) takes you through the by-now familiar drill of security problems with Microsoft’s flagship... [More]

PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera (Slashdot) is a discussion about Firefox, for the most part. Several times during the discussion, people praise the Extension Manager in Firefox.

It’s not enough.

To really take off, this Extension Manager is an excellent base. However, if you visit the site and see the jungle of plugins that await you, you’re a fool if you think “most” people are willing to wade through it to configure their browser. Programmers and geeks love it. “Most” people will not.

Here’s the... [More]

Here is an intriguing solution to spam. An infinite supply of email addresses; useful for when you must submit a usable email address (e.g. where a mail is sent to verify registration).

All mail sent to addresses you give out from spamgourmet is routed through that site and filtered through rules before going to your real address. For example, if your user name is ‘dude’, then you can sign up for a dodgy website with:

xxxgirls.5.dude@spamgourmet.com

This will allow 5 messages sent to this... [More]

Stupid Microsoft Tricks by Robert Cringely (PBS) talks about recent happenings in yet another lawsuit for anti-competitive practices that Microsoft is involved in; in this case, they are accused of flat-out stealing another company’s technology after prolonged (2 years) discussions with that company about licensing.

When asked to provide all emails from that period, the record at Microsoft came up blank for 35 weeks.

“The reason for this mass erasure, it was explained, is that Burst technology was unimpressive and not... [More]”

Microsoft has been just plain bad in the world of business for a long time. They break rules, abuse monopolies and starve or absorb entire industries right and left. They’ve got strangleholds in dozens of tech markets and leverage them all to acquire even more. They get caught all over the world − you relatively often read of Microsoft in court or paying fines − but they continue to do business exactly the same way.

Why is that?

The answer is relatively obvious, but Timing is Everything by Robert Cringely... [More]

Please be advised of a new Microsoft Knowledge Base article entitled: Steps that you can take to help…. In it, you’ll find the recommendation that you should “…not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them in the Address bar yourself.”

So now, you have to type all URLs by hand because Microsoft can’t fix their browser. Isn’t it time to consider Opera or Firefox?

A read on Slashdot put this latest development into persepective:

“To go back to an often used analogy, if Microsoft... [More]”

I’m still waiting on my next digital camera. Foveon is the technology I want, I just don’t know of any cameras that use it (or that are in my price range).

The diagram to the left shows the technology behind this successor to the standard CCD:

“The layers are positioned to take advantage of the fact that silicon absorbs different wavelengths of light to different depths, so one layer records red, another layer records green and the other layer records blue. This means that for every pixel... [More]”

Why doesn’t MSN work with Opera? is a systematic investigation of the behavior of the MSN website when approached by different web clients. Recently, Opera Software discovered that on the home page for the MSN web-site, “…it looks like Opera7 has a serious flaw so that many lines are partially hidden [and] the page shows less content than users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (MSIE) see.”

They concluded that the MSN web-site is sending back a different style sheet to only Opera browsers.... [More]

Slashdot reports in Another Critical Microsoft Hole that IE, once again, has a problem with granting ActiveX controls too many rights. This latest security flaw in Windows NT/2000 (not present in XP) is a really good as the best solution Microsoft can recommend is to “…to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft.” (Security Bulletin MS02-065). That means you have to remove all the trusted publishers from your list, because the control at issue is actually signed and... [More]

The August 15, 2002 Cryptogram by Bruce Schneier at Counterpane Internet Security explains what is known about “Palladium”, the code-name for Microsoft’s trusted computing intiative. It’s abbreviated as Pd, like an element. Isn’t that cute. This is a natural outgrowth of Hollywood’s (in the form of the MPAA and the RIAA) jihad against its customer base and our acceptance of the blame. It aims to use hardware to prevent people from doing anything that Hollywood doesn’t want them to with... [More]

Am I looking for conspiracies where they don’t exist when I read The Importance Of Being In India in Business World India and this article, Bill Gates pledges $100 million to fight AIDS in India on Canada.com on the same day and wonder whether the two are connected? I mean, Gates himself said that “…[h]e worried that India’s enormous progress in information technology − the country has the only Microsoft software development centre outside the United States − would be thwarted by AIDS.” At this... [More]

The Washington Post reports in Europe’s Microsoft Alternative that a region of Spain, “a western region of Spain called Extremadura, a mostly rural expanse of olive trees and tiny towns with 1.1 million inhabitants”, is planning “to convert all the area’s computer systems, in government offices, businesses and homes, from the Windows operating system to Linux”. This is a trend that started in Asia, with first China, then India, declaring that they would be standardizing on Linux or other... [More]

3.998GHz! Now that’s an overclocked chip. This was spotted at Slashdot in an article called P4 2.80GHz Overclocked to 3.917GHz. In their English language abstract, they mention that they actually got it to run at 3.998GHz after all. Yeah, those numbers are correct. These crazy Finnish guys place the entire chip assembly into a bath of liquid nitrogen inside a styrofoam cup (see picture). In a couple of pictures, you can see the Fluke thermometer registering -193°C! The whole site’s in Finnish,... [More]

Ars Technica has a rundown on the latest Apple/Mac conference, MacWorld New York, in MWNY Keynote: Time to line the RDF with asbestos?, which announced a lot of new products, both hardware and software. Most of the hardware changes are incremental updates, with the IMac upgrading to a 17" wide screen, which is very cool. The IPod now has “[u]p to 20 GB of storage, official support for calendar and contacts, and Windows support via MusicMatch.”

The most interesting updates are on the software... [More]

Opera casts off legacy code for speed on CNet’s News.com provides basically a press release about Opera’s new 7.0 browser, dubbed Presto. Latest information on the 7.0 release is available on Opera software’s 7.0 page.

“Dubbed Project Presto, after the musical tempo-character marking indicating speed and lightness, the rewritten browser was designed to make Opera both faster and more compatible with the Document Object Model (DOM), an emerging standard technology that lets scripts, like... [More]”

Almost 2 months ago, the Mozilla project finally released a 1.0 version of its browser. Mozilla Milestone 1.0: the Review on Ars Technica gives a good overview and review of the final product.

Those who’ve downloaded builds of Mozilla over the years have doubtless found that Mozilla seems to suffer from an identity crisis. Sometimes it seems like a browser, sometimes it seems like a standards-compliant rendering engine, sometimes it feels like a development environment cum operating system. It... [More]

State of Decay on DDJ documents a new classification system for a phenomenon everyone in the computing world has experienced: cruft. Cruft is defined thusly:

“When you spot a class interface that is no longer used by any client, but that nobody dare delete, that’s cruft. It is also the word “seperate,” added to a spellchecker’s private dictionary in a moment of careless haste, and now waiting for a suitably important document. Cruft is the cruel corruption and confusion inevitably wrought by... [More]”

And for more than just the usual reasons of getting your mail delivered through the evil empire. This time, they’re deleting your mail without warning as ZDNet point out in Microsoft begins to clean out Hotmail “[a]s part of a series of new storage policies aimed at driving more people toward its paid services”.

So, in addition to Microsoft changing their privacy policy every couple of weeks by adding some extra vendor-sharing checkboxes to their preferences, then selecting them as ‘on’ by... [More]

GM’s Billion-Dollar Bet on Wired.com is about GM’s bold plans for a fuel-cell vehicle by 2010, long before other major rivals expect to be forced by oil shortages to change their fleet. In short, GM sees opportunity in fuel-cells because it allows them to design a car that requires far less tooling, less design and fewer moving parts than the internal combustion dinosaurs we think are advanced now.

The car itself will be quite different from cars today simply because the move to fuel cells... [More]

Ars Technica has a Satellite Radio Review. It discusses availability, content, and pricing. There are currently two providers in the market, XM Radio and Sirius. The technology behind it is quite involved, with XM Radio supporting a “100,000 Sq. Ft. broadcasting facility in Washington DC”. The whole enterprise is enormously expensive:

“Sirius radio operates three birds all at Geo-Sync orbit as well. When you add up the cost for digital audio storage, encoders, multiplexers, modems, satellite... [More]”

You may start to hear more about this phenomenon called ‘warchalking’ sooner of later. With the increase in wireless internet access, users with a lot of extra bandwidth are wondering how to let others know what sort of access is available in the area. Enter warchalking. Business Week has the article A Wireless End Run Around ISPs discussing how this trend started, some symbols to recognize and possible future usage or problems.

Advocates of a free internet have been creating their own... [More]

A Guide To Metric Time… seen on Slashdot in Isn’t it Time for Metric Time? discusses a proposed system for converting to base-ten time. As if the U.S. doesn’t have enough problems converting to metric measurement, except curiously for soda containers, here comes a new proposal sure not to be adopted.

“Metric Time (MT) is an attempt to create a decimalized time system for our modern base-10 using world. This is a neglected part of the Metric System (or SI) which has created a whole measuring... [More]”

The Register has Corporates! Give your PCs to Africa, a drive by Computer Aid International to get corporations to donate their “end-of-life PCs” to a good cause.

“In the West, organisations consign millions of usable PCs to the scrap heap each year. … End-of-life PCs are worthless to most companies − but invaluable to school children. Companies have written down the value of their redundant computers to nil, and all they see is a headache in getting rid of their old kit. We can take care of... [More]”

Opera Software has a recent press announcement, Opera strikes accord with Macromedia…, which announces that future Macromedia products for the MacOS will use the embedded Opera engine to render pages.

“Opera will deliver a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser to be integrated into a wide range of Macromedia Web development products. … Opera and Macromedia will work together to develop and maintain an application programming interface (API) for an embedded browser on the... [More]”

Wired.com has an article that teaches you How to Disappear. If you’re like me and get about 150 junk mails over a long weekend, you may want to read this article on how to opt-out for good. The article gives a “three-tiered guide to pick a level of solitude”.

At the intro level, they suggest to just write to large name-database clearinghouses and demand to be expunged, anonymize your web access by surfing by proxy or using an anonymous remailer (which aren’t illegal in the U.S. yet).

The next... [More]

MS security patch EULA gives Billg admin privileges on your box on The Register talks about the new EULA for the recent patch to Window Media Player. It seems to involve some wording that allows Microsoft to upgrade your machine and software automatically to conform to DRM standards it, and its content providers, have agreed to. Whether you’ve agreed to it doesn’t matter. Your agreement is implicit in your use of the patch for the security holes in their software. That’s right, they ship... [More]