INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK ||| MONO*CRAFTS

Grandfather Economic Report - Home Page - by MWHodges Cleaning up my bookmarks. Found this. Great intor to the real world for Liberals (lots of pictures!)

USNews.com: Health: In Brief: Seniors' Health: Longevity (12/31/04): "It must be the chocolate...or the cheese...or the Alpine air...or the fierce independence. People in Switzerland are more likely to make it to 100 than people in any other European country. Researchers in France and in Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva, looked at patterns of age in Switzerland." Definitely, HAS to be the chocolate.

IBM hands Lenovo billion-dollar PC loser | The Register

Philips DVP642 DVD player brings MPEG4 to the masses

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine An article well worth reading in its entirety at some point.

Ernie The Attorney: Windows error messages make me feel at home Don't tell me that all the news stories detailing commuter delays over the holidays forgot to mention that it was a WINDOWS problem!

Web3D Consortium - Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

The Flux Papers"In my world view, the best and surest path to making money with real time interactive 3D over the long haul requires standards. Are they sufficient? Of course not. But they are absolutely necessary. Without standards, the market will never reach an interesting enough size. Without standards, customers will never invest in a new technology like real time 3D, unless of course it is supplied by you-know-who, and they don?t seem to be in much of a hurry. (The latest estimates I?ve heard place spinning boxes in the operating system by 2007. Sorry, Bill, but the world isn?t going to wait that long.) Without standards, real time 3D will continue wandering about its own version of the Balkans, with rich content trapped in $20,000 CAD design seats or withering away on proprietary vines, unplayable because the player company is out of business or changed its mind to meet the fashion of the day."

Adobe AtmosphereOUCH! I really liked this program. Excep they became too dependant on Windows and IE.

My Way News: "Egeland told reporters on Tuesday: 'I've been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that I believed that rich countries in general can be more generous.'" No, Fire this guy.

U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - December 28, 2004UN: Fire this guy!

Block I Apollo Guidance Computer Replica

New World Notes: THE NINE SOULS OF WILDE CUNNINGHAM, PART I

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Scientists get to the root of colour loss: "The scientists traced the greying process to the demise of a type of stem cell in the skin. These make a continuous supply of melanocytes, cells which produce pigments in skin and hair. These stem cells not only get depleted over time, they also start making mistakes, turning into melanocytes in the wrong place in the hair follicle where they are unable to colour the hair."

Next IBM-Apple chip getting high-end feature | CNET News.com: "The technology, called partitioning, relies on a concept called virtualization that breaks the hard link between an operating system and the underlying hardware. Partitioning is available today only on servers using IBM's higher-end Power4 and Power5 processors and in competing server designs from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel." Can ya dig it?

Salt Lake Tribune - Breaking: Corporate ousters at SCO parent company At lat this disgusting debacle draws to a close!

The Linux Link: Portal To Linux Web Radio Shows

LugRadio.org - Home page

Google Pictures: Chris Breikss and Google Adwords Team Members Is it just me or is there a bit of nepotism going on here?

Torvalds: A Solaris skeptic | Newsmakers | CNET News.com: "That's why I think the commercial desktop is important: It's what made DOS (and later Windows) feel familiar to people, and I think that's where the more general desktop push ends up happening. But it's going to take years" I'm glad he said that.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Washington Post buys Slate online magazine: "Microsoft Corp. sold its popular Slate online magazine Tuesday to The Washington Post Co., a move that makes Slate's political commentary and quirky feature articles more broadly available across the Internet." Now I find this an odd statement, true though it may be, that content owned by a traditional print media company has a better chance of being broadly available on the Internet than it has in the hands of a major, no THE major software company of our time. It says a lot about the nature of Microsoft.

Walmart.com debuts sub-$500 Linux laptop It's a sad day when you can buy a laptop computer for less than the cost of a limited palmtop device. Gradually these price inequities are being erased. Now for another round of price cutting on desktop systems, and more pressure on software companies to admit that they have long ago amortized their development costs or come out with something that is actually new and innovative. For that last item we won't be holding our breath.

On-demand publishing for books, music, images: Lulu.com

Linux Opinion: An Open Letter to a Digital World (LinuxWorld)(Printview): "The clean up from these types of infections is great fun. I spent not less than 5 hours running about every spyware prevention program known to man. Each one searching for those pesky files and registry settings. The worst thing of all was that, once I cleared them off the disk, simply starting Internet Explorer would reinfect the whole system. Seriously, it was great fun and I did, eventually, have the satisfaction of beating the problem. That's right - a system administrator for 10 years with a degree in computer science and a RHCE CAN clean up a single spyware infection in 5 hours." Maybe the ACLU should sue Microsoft. Two sources of evil in perpetual death grip. Worse could happen.

ACLU members cry foul over its data collection - The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA Maybe they should sue themselves?

OfB.biz: Open for Business - Perspectives on KDE Multimedia: "The second question, however, is much harder. 'What goals are those and how do we decide which applications best fulfill those?' That's something that I think traditional development models would answer with 'Here's the application that you'll use, because it's, well, the only one that we're giving you.' I must say that at times the simplicity of such is appealing. But we're more or less forced into an evolutionary approach, which I think has some nice side effects as well."

BOFH gets into the Xmas spirit | The Register

Moore's Law turns into Moron's Law

OhmyNews International Interesting.

Wired News: Linux: Fewer Bugs Than Rivals From the We Think We Already Knew This department.

Harvard University Library: "Harvard Libraries and Google Announce Pilot Digitization Project with Potential Benefits to Scholars Worldwide"

InformationWeek > Browser Security > Penn State Tells 80,000 Students To Chuck IE > December 10, 2004: "'The University computing community [should] use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities,' added ITS." Who knows. Could a standards based operating system be next?

Wintasks 5 Professional: A Windows background boffin Windows: A popular computer operating system of the late 20th century known for including things not normally thought to belong in an operating system and yet still leaving out basic things like complete task monitoring.

Forbes.com: The Battle Of The DVD: "The consortiums backing both are marching on, despite the fact that the duel between the VHS and Betamax video tape formats is cited ad nauseum as a textbook example of a costly business blunder that angered consumers and held back the technology's adoption." Note to media giants: F-you!

IEEE Spectrum Careers"In particular, Smucker's claimed that Albie's had infringed Smucker's recently granted U.S. Patent No. 6004596, which gives the Orrville, Ohio, company broad protection on its "sealed crustless sandwich." In a move that undoubtedly surprised the jam magnates, Albie's decided to defend itself in federal court. Albie's law firm noted in its filings that the "pasty"?a meat pie with crimped edges?has been popular fare in northern Michigan since the immigration of copper and iron miners from Cornwall, England, in the 19th century. A battle in federal court over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches may seem merely funny and a little pathetic. But it is symptomatic of the larger and more profound problems with the U.S. patent system. We have reached the point where serious lawyers are being paid serious fees by a big company to shut down the PB&J operation of a grocery store."

USATODAY.com - Deciphered chicken genome sheds light on human DNA: "Not surprisingly, chickens were found to lack any version of the human genes for milk, saliva and tooth enamel. These genes were, as the scientists put it in a presentation for reporters, as rare as hen's teeth. Unfortunately, the new analysis shed no light on a mystery that has long bedeviled humanity: Why does the chicken cross the road? 'That question,' Wilson observed in an interview, 'is still out there to be answered.'"

Apple of IBM's eye? | The Registermmmm-meby.

Is IBM PC sell off preparation for a Power chip attack? | The Register *nods*

MSNBC - Bloggerman by Keith Olbermann"If untold numbers of operatives really were dispatched to polling places around the country to enact the most nefarious political plot in this country?s history, why would the ring-leaders reveal to any of them any of the following: * The total amount spent on the plan (Madsen drops the $29 million dollar figure in the first sentence)? * The primary source of the carefully laundered cash (Madsen sites ?Five Star Trust?)? * The sources of ?other money used to fund the election rigging? (Madsen lists ?siphoned Enron money stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands?)? Most importantly, having told their minions all of this damning information, having sent them out on an evil mission that if exposed could overturn an election and require the building of extra prisons just to hold all those who would be convicted in such an overarching scheme, why on earth would they try toget away with not paying them?" Other good thoughts there too.

The New Yorker: The Perfect Mystery"He had been investigating the whereabouts of an archive of Conan Doyle?s papers, which he believed had been stolen. At the same time, he hinted that there had been threats to his life and that he was being followed; soon afterward, he was found garroted in his room, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord around his neck."

Coastal drowning scenario? Interesting info on other topics too.

Lawmakers Want MLB to Fix Steroid Woes"Sen. John McCain, the driving force behind changing how baseball polices performance-enhancing drug use, said Sunday he believes President Bush would sign a bill into law." Drudge had a good idea about this... How about mandatory drug tests for Congresspeople. Makes perfect sense to me. Baseball players can take all the drugs they want as far as I care.

AMD projects January Shock'n'Awe

MSNBC - The Airbus Showdown: "It's time to stop the subsidy game. The Bush administration proposed a pragmatic bargain: all past subsidies would be accepted; future subsidies would be banned. Airbus plans a direct competitor plane to the 7E7 (to be called the A350) and wants more subsidies. These would be prohibited. If Boeing countered the A380 with an improved version of its jumbo 747, it would be barred from subsidies."

flotilla

flotilla,
originally uploaded by macb.

Really huge flotilla of seagulls a few hundred yards off the beach. Has been out there for at least an hour.