Yahoo! News - Berger to Plead Guilty So, how is it that someone who commits an act, that under slightly different circumstances could carry as much as the death penalty for espionage, get off so easily, and have the article reporting it devote half of the word to criticizing the Bush administration? Oh, wait, its and AP story. Never-mind.

Wired News: RFID Cards Get Spin Treatment Things that make you go hmmmm.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft plans 'safer ID' system "Up to 200 million Passport accounts were left vulnerable to online theft and malicious hackers after a flaw in the system was exploited in 2003. Online auction site, eBay, stopped supporting it in January 2005." What idiots!

Microsoft's Grand Plan To Go Vertical: "IBM realigned its sales and software strategy vertically, starting in late 2003. Now it's Microsoft's turn to try to do the same." ... "Microsoft isn't building any vertical apps, McCollum emphasized. But he did acknowledge that Microsoft's new vertical focus will have an impact over time on how Microsoft designs and develops its products. McCollum didn't specify exactly how this change will occur or what form it will take." Uh. I wonder why that might be? Finding an e-Week article dated 01/05 is not the same as figuring out when IBM went vertical. I'd peg it in the 80's somewhere, but considering the company made clocks, card sorters, typewriters and a lot of other things not strictly associated with mainframe data processing you could say they have ALWAYS been a vertical company. They've had consulting services as long as I can remember and within that had specific industry focus. IBM has thus had breadth and depth unlike almost any other company in history. At the other end of the spectrum... Of course, anyone who stares at Microsoft too long will become blinded to the fact that their focus has been so incredibly narrow with respect to almost any other company of their size and wealth. This move *is* their only way out, but having painted themselves into a situation with only one exit strategy possible is hardly something over which they should be complimented. I noticed that one industry pundit has taken to referring to HP as the "Ink Maker", and maybe its time to come up with a cute name to remind people that Microsoft's only claim to fame is a poorly designed and aging operating system with some end-user "productivity" tools to go along with it. I guess we might have trouble coming up with anything better than "micro-soft" though. It's hard to find companies who have survived from one generation to the next, and those who have have generally don't so by wildly diversifying themselves. Microsoft has shown little inclination to do this, and where there has been inclination, talent is lacking. What Microsoft watchers might want to start doing is making book on what their chances of success are. I'd rate them at less than half.

New York Daily News - Business - Post delivers circ mess

Forbes.com: Teen Builds Linux Workaround For iTunes

Joel on Software - Monday, March 14, 2005: "If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform." I think it has been time since the 60's. It just takes some people longer to figure it out.

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Break, Blow, Burn': Well Versed: "In her exemplary analysis of Shelley's ''Ozymandias,'' for example, she could easily have referred to the last scene of ''Planet of the Apes,'' when Charlton Heston looks up at the Statue of Liberty's head just as Shelley's ''traveler from an antique land'' looked up at the truncated legs of stone. I was rather expecting her to. Perhaps she has realized, however, that the pace of forgetfulness is always accelerating, and that we have moved from an era of people who have never heard of Shelley to an era of people who have never heard of Charlton Heston."

Yahoo! News - Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Bone "The finding certainly shows fossilization does not proceed as science had assumed, Schweitzer said. Since the discovery, she has found similar samples of soft tissue in two other Tyrannosaur fossils and a hadrosaur." WOW Two strikes in a row this week for "generally accepted" DNA science. The other one being: Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene

Seth Nickell - Design Fu

The Unofficial Apple Weblog - apple.weblogsinc.com

Virtual-Addiction

Color Fields Colr Pickr Neat Flickr API application.

TCS: Tech Central Station - iPod Therefore iAm

TCS: Tech Central Station - Where Free Markets Meet Technology

The New Yorker: "Most national-security Democrats believe that the Party?s problems on the issue go deeper than marketing. They agree that the Party should be more open to the idea of military action, and even preëmption; and although they did not agree about the timing of the Iraq war and the manner in which Bush launched it, they believe that the stated rationale?Saddam?s brutality and his flouting of United Nations resolutions?was ideologically and morally sound. They say that the absence of weapons of mass destruction was more a failure of intelligence than a matter of outright deception by the Administration; and although they do not share the neoconservatives? enthusiastic belief in the transformative power of military force, they accept the possibility that the invasion of Iraq might lead to the establishment of democratic institutions there." Interesting article pointing out the deep division in the Democrat party on defense issues.

Yahoo! News - Professor Charged With Faking Grant Info Too bad this wasn't an environmental scientist. But then their subject matter is very hard to verify.

BBC NEWS | Technology | If you agree, click here...: "The terms and conditions accompanying software go by the formidable name of the End User Licence Agreement or Eula (pronounced to rhyme with fool-ya)"

discoverthenetwork.org Hehe, handy reference on the left.

Blackberry includes Yahoo! instant message - (United Press International) From the been-there-done-that department. Yahoo and RIM: Please go directly to F-ing HELL. Do not pass GO. I signed up for something like this a couple years ago. Got a slight price reduction on the cost of the hardware (still overpriced IMHO) and paid something a month that resembled the cost of a cell phone (but you could only do text messaging). The service sucked. About one in ten messages got through, the rest timed out. Even when the little antenna indicator was good, which often involved crossing the street, getting out of your car, etc, the message would time out. It was really useless for business, and marginal for "hi how ya doing" sort of messaging. After a year they announce discontinuance of the service and only offered a new contract directly through RIM at about triple the monthly cost. I said no-thank you and threw the boat anchor hardware away. No new business with either company for me. Thank you very-bait-and-switch-much.

My Way News: "Looking at public perceptions of the media, the report showed that more people thought the media was unfair to both Kerry and Bush than to the candidates four years earlier, but fewer people thought news organizations had too much influence on the outcome of the election. 'It may be that the expectations of the press have sunk enough that they will not sink much further. People are not dismayed by disappointments in the press. They expect them,' the authors of the report said."

AOL's Terms of Service Update for AIM Raises Eyebrows Hmmmmm.

Global Warming Bombshell Not that new, but interesting.

Joe Jackson - Videos This was actually pretty good. Even though William Shatner was involved.

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - The Blogs Must Be Crazy - Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy. Her most chilling prediction: "Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they're going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it's there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They're going to do some big work down the road." Will the infrastructure of the Internet be all that easy to rebuild from scratch? Or will we be talking in Morse code for a while? I wonder if "DotDashBlog.com" is taken?

Microsoft updates IM, Web conferencing products | Tech News on ZDNet: "Finally, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Web conferencing program and service, called Office Live Meeting. That program is based on software Microsoft acquired along with PlaceWare in 2003. 'When we did the PlaceWare acquisition, our bet was that this was going to be a huge area,' Raikes said. Companies are turning to Web conferencing to save on costs, Raikes said, adding that Microsoft saved more than $40 million on business-travel-related costs by using Live Meeting internally." How many times have we heard this? I'm not holding my breath for the time when those who can justify it to get free travel away from their jobs, wives, and other unpleasentries, AND get all those frequent flyer miles to boot. Online conferencing will take off right after ZD and others close down their print operations in favor of Internet-only distribution, that is, when the cows come home (on Neptune!)

Ohio law would require auction license for eBay sellers - Mar. 7, 2005: "Besides costing $200 and posting a $50,000 bond, the license requires a one-year apprenticeship to a licensed auctioneer, acting as a bid-caller in 12 auctions, attending an approved auction school, passing a written and oral exam. Failure to get a license could result in the seller being fined up to $1,000 and jailed for a maximum of 90 days."

My Way News: "Cronkite called Schieffer 'one of the great television journalists of our time.' 'Although Dan did a fine job, I would have liked to have seen (Schieffer) there a long time ago,' Cronkite said during an interview on CNN. 'He would have given the others a real run for their money.'"

TechWeb | News | New IM Worms Hit MSN Messenger: "But another reason -- one less well-known, said Sakoda -- is that Microsoft's IM clients, and its network, can be accessed through APIs. 'They're embedded in the operating system, and allow experienced hackers a way to take over the MSN client.' The experience hackers have in breaking down Windows also helps explain the high number of IM worms that exploit Microsoft's clients and network."

Forbes.com: Bumbling Bully: "After two years, SCO still hasn't provided any evidence to back up its claim against IBM, something a judge recently chided it for. Now we find out it can't even handle basic accounting. "

Yahoo! News - Saddam's son Uday was poised to topple dad : controversial US journalist: "In that interview just days before Baghdad fell, he said the US war plan was failing. 'Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces,' he said." Yep. He was full of shit then, and he is full of it still.

Microsoft shuts down net activations: "Microsoft said that resellers, like Dell and HP, would always sell boxes on which the Windows operating system had already been activated. However customers who wanted to reactivate their machines after a reinstall would have to call customer service to get a key." I have a way they can end piracy of Windows altogether! And no, I don't mean give it away, because people would then still continue to clog the Information Superhighway with their tricycles.

‘World is not ready’ for a flu pandemic Will be the title of today's lecture in the Tautology 101 Workshop. Please arrive at class ready to make an appearance.

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Mideast Climate Change Subhead: Entire New York Times suffers stroke.

?Honey pot? experiment shows unprotected Windows SP 1 at risk