Monday, December 23, 2002

Lemieux

Lemieux

digitalMass at Boston.com

digitalMass at Boston.com Mitch Kapor uses his personal fortune to create free software he says will outdo Microsoft Outlook

By Chris Gaither, Globe Staff, 12/20/2002

DMCA comments published

DMCA comments published The DMCA, one might recall, is that draconian law purchased by the major media conglomerates to extend their monopolies on music and movies right into your personal life, a step on the path to universal pay-per-use.

It's the law Russian programmer Dimitri Sklyarov was arrested for having allegedly broken -- even though he wrote his program in Russia, where it was perfectly legal. His employer, Elcomsoft, was recently tried instead under the criminal provisions of the DMCA and... they were acquitted.

Friday, December 20, 2002

A drop of ocean water tells a story About ten thousand bacterioplankton of the type SAR 11 are found in every drop of seawater. And yet, as explained in the article, which gives the first accurate quantitative assessment of SAR 11, scientists are only beginning to understand what these organisms do.

CRWS Jet Stream Map Menu

CRWS Jet Stream Map Menu

The Register

The Register Prices of printer cartridges look set to drop thanks to a new EU law that will ban printer firms from forcing consumers to buy their own-brand refills.
The European Parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday in favour of a new EU "electroscrap" recycling law, which includes a ruling directing manufacturers of printers to no longer incorporate chips into their own-brand ink refill cartridges. These chips prevent cartridges produced by other manufacturers from being used in many printers.

In addition, proponents of the measure say the chips prevent them from being refilled -- a feature on many cartridges made by printer manufacturers.

News

News Teams of researchers from around the world have shown that tiny strands of RNA possess incredible powers of control over genes by shutting them off like a light switch, effectively rendering them impotent by interference. Small strands of RNA can even chop into the DNA of the genes directly to rearrange large pieces of the chromosomes. "Remarkably, in some species, truncated RNA molecules literally shape genomes, carving out chunks to keep and discarding others," Science says. "There are even hints that certain small RNAs might help chart a cell's destiny by directing genes to turn on or off during development, which could have profound implications for coaxing cells to form one type of tissue or another."

Thursday, December 19, 2002

160 mm for a Hub

Dead link seems to be about hubs for tandem bicyle.
160 mm for a Hub

Scott Report

Scott Report

The CAPTCHA Project.

The CAPTCHA Project.

Friday, December 13, 2002

BeOS Max @ Crux

BeOS Max @ Crux

Tipping with Usability : opinion : uidesign.net

Tipping with Usability : opinion : uidesign.net

American Scientist - Computing Science

American Scientist - Computing Science


In my hand I hold a metal box, festooned with labels, serial numbers, bar codes and tamperproof seals. Inside the box is everything I have written over the past 10 years—articles, a book, memos, notes, programs, letters, e-mail, shopping lists. And there’s still plenty of room left for everything I might hope to write in the next 10 years. For an author, it’s a little humbling to see so much of a life’s work encompassed in a tin box just big enough for a couple dozen pencils.

The metal box, of course, is a disk drive. And it’s not even the latest model. This one is a decade old and has a capacity of 120 megabytes, roughly equivalent to 120 million characters of unformatted text. The new disk that will replace it looks much the same—just a little slimmer and sleeker—but it holds a thousand times as much: 120 gigabytes, or 1.2 x 1011 characters of text. That’s room enough not only for everything I’ve ever written but also for everything I’ve ever read. Here in the palm of one hand is space for a whole intellectual universe—all the words that enter a human mind in a lifetime of reading.

Thursday, December 12, 2002

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource In a rather interesting development in the world of distributed computing, Gateway has moved into a market segment traditionally dominated by the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. Gateway is offering their own version of grid computing called Processing on Demand, utilizing the combined processing power of their nearly 8,000 PCs scattered throughout their 272 Gateway Country stores. Capable of 14 TFLOPs, the combined power of their PCs outranks the world's most powerful supercomputer as ranked by top500.org.

Charging fifteen cents per individual CPU hour for as much CPU power that is needed, Gateway's solution will enable many corporations to more cost-effectively do large computations. Rather than purchasing large quantities of hardware that quickly become outdated

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

BePage at www.b500.com

BePage at www.b500.com

yellowTAB - New Generation BeOS Solutions :: History

yellowTAB - New Generation BeOS Solutions :: History

Welcome to TotallyBe

Welcome to TotallyBe

Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction.

Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction.

OpenBeOS Project

OpenBeOS Project


My first glimpse of BeOS came in college (no surprise). After the death of the Amiga, I sketched out an operating system design and took classes to learn how to implement it. In one of those classes, I met Scott. I showed him my sketches (object hierarchies) and he told me to look at the BeBook. I was shocked - it was 95% the same as what I had sketched out! When I saw the BeBox (Scott had one), I was immediately taken with it. I started saving money to buy one. Scott went on vacation and I borrowed his for a couple of weeks. It was pure heaven! Right around the time that I had the money to buy the BeBox, the Mac port came out. I decided to put the money toward a Power Computing Mac Clone. Right around the time that I had the money for the Power machine that I was looking at, Steve Jobs shut down the clone companies. So I sat tight.

Monday, December 09, 2002

OpenBeOS Project - Displaying Newsletter

OpenBeOS Project - Displaying Newsletter For those of you who may not be so "enlightened" as to the purpose and concept of .Net, let me attempt to explain from a high-level perspective. The concept, at least as far as I have seen, is that web pages can be authored using an object hierarchy. This object hierarchy uses JavaScript as its basis for client-side interactions. You can derive from a standard object and build a new object which other .Net programmers can use. These objects can have two different types of interactions - server-side and client-side. Client-side interactions are typical JavaScript callbacks (mouse over, etc). Server-side interactions are what we used to call "Submits" - so named after the concept that the end user would fill in some data on a web form and press the submit button. The page's information, including object states is sent back to the web server where it is processed.

The clever part of this, on the business side of things is that, of course, you need a web server. And guess who makes the only web server that handles .Net objects? Yes, surprise, it is IIS. Microsoft sells updates to Visual Studio to developers, and more web server licenses.

The clever side of this on the technical end of things is that developers are being pressed to make everything a "web application". Much of this perspective relates to the poor way that Windows (even the vaunted XP) deals with the installation of software. You have to be an administrator to install a good deal of software. Since IT staff can't/shouldn't/won't give that right to everyone, IT staff has to install all of the software, which makes every upgrade that a company goes through costly (overtime, etc). Compare this to installing the software once, on the web server, and letting everyone access it - no licensing issues, no dll misery - just apps. Reminds me of my mainframe days.

Thursday, December 05, 2002

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource

Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource Posted 12/4/2002 - 10:30PM, by zAmboni
In news that rivals the completion of the Human Genome Project, researchers have revealed the first high quality public sequence of the mouse genome. Some researchers believe the mouse genome is more exciting than the human genome. Why? Mainly because libraries full of research have been conducted with mice, and mice are currently being used to study human diseases and basic biology. Needless to say, it is a bit tougher to do the same experimentation on humans.

Early analyses confirm preliminary estimates on the similarity between the mouse and human genomes. Ninety-nine percent of human DNA matches that of mice, and the two genomes both contain an estimated 30,000 genes. Only 300 of the mice genes have no counterpart in the human genome and vice versa.

Probably the most interesting finding, to me at least, is that many non-coding regions of DNA (what many news outlets like to erroneously call "junk DNA"), are conserved between humans and mice. I personally think the non-coding regions are very important in gene regulation, and contain the information on what makes mice, mice and men, men. The journal Nature has put together information on the arrival of the mouse genome here.

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

CRN: Daily Archives

CRN: Daily Archives By Paula Rooney, CRN
Boston
5:17 PM EST Tues., Dec. 03, 2002

Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik said Microsoft's legal efforts to challenge open source by employing patent infringement law represent a big threat.

"It's a credible threat, no doubt about it," said Szulik, a native son of Massachusetts who returned to deliver the keynote at Enterprise Linux Forum here. "We see the threat of costs of litigation could be harmful, cause a disenfranchisement of the global collaborative [development] community and disrupt the speed of innovation. Yes, I think it's quite credible."

So You Wanna Create Your Own x86 Operating System? LG #85

So You Wanna Create Your Own x86 Operating System? LG #85

Hezbollah calls for global attacks -- The Washington Times

Hezbollah calls for global attacks -- The Washington Times Two recent speeches by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, have raised the specter of attacks outside the region by a powerful and well-organized military force

Herpes vaccine has promise for stemming spread -- The Washington Times

Herpes vaccine has promise for stemming spread -- The Washington Times

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