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A few news items to start the day, with comments...
Transmeta comes out of its long secrecy with Crusoe chip
family. All very interesting, and the public lineup of Linus
Torvalds, CEO Dave Ditzel, Paul Allen, and George Soros gives pause for thought.
But it's a long and rocky road to carve out a market, so we'll have to wait
and see what actually becomes a buyable product here. Fast, low-power mobile
computing is a hot market.
Companies have reported a huge rise in information theft
within the last 17 months, according to a recent survey by the American
Society for Industrial Security and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
NDAs are more and more being backed up with even more restrictive
contracts and lawsuits when companies suspect employees of passing on or
using proprietary information. The marked trend where companies are trying
to get their employees to use the corporate intranet as their private web
portals may in light of this have a sinister side, because this clearly allows
the company to police employee activities off the job as well.
An Argentine villager has dug up the bones of what may be the largest
dinosaur species yet uncovered. Local paleontologists said the dinosaur
was a herbivore measuring up to 51 metres (167 ft) long -- beating its nearest
rival, the 100-ton Argentinosaurus huinculensis, by a good eight
metres (26 ft). Giants walked the earth... They keep finding these
things.
The world's smallest piece of ice. Chemists at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, engineered just six molecules of water
into flat hexagonal rings - just as ice exists in nature. Meanwhile
locals in Spain have the past week been dodging mysterious
basketball-sized chunks of ice falling from the sky -- origin unknown,
but ice from aircraft has been discounted, as well as comet ice. The chunks
are said to be far too large to be the result of freak weather effects. Analysis
pending of the apparently 100% pure, colorless ice. A "Fortean" event of
high mystery coefficient, well documented with many large ice chunks preserved.
At least one car was badly damaged by a fall.
TurboLinux expects to receive a $57 million investment --
the largest round of private funding a Linux company has ever received. Investors
include Dell, Compaq, Intel, and many others. The TurboLinux specialty
includes proprietary code to make server-farms for website hosting.
Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce firms seem poised
for huge growth, and investors are eagerly buying stock in these companies.
We still need better ways to handle online payments, especially on
the Business to Consumer (B2C) end. B2B is still relying on traditional billing
cycles and already established payment routines -- the growth is largely
in the faster ordering turnaround. Related to this is the indication that
the major US car manufacturers are going to have online pricing available
to consumers, much against the wishes of their dealers. The growing e-commerce
sector is in addition already driving work to improve Internet connectivity
with faster access and lower downtime on network and websites.
Backchannel has lately turned to providing Lat/Long figures for
daynoter locations. Plotted on e.g. an xearth globe, this provides and
interesting sense of community immediacy in the desktop background (Ah,
Shawn has just experienced dawn. Sven and Chris, like I, have evening. And
Dan Seto is still doubtless fast asleep, way over there in
Honolululand...). All we need now is a videocam channel to keep track
of how hard we all work... <g>.
<later> I took some time out to read the latest SciAm issue.
As always, there are several interesting articles. More details about the
moons of Jupiter for example -- the more they study the Galileo mission data,
the more fun stuff they discover. Also a fascinating piece on why ice is
slippery -- most textbooks on that subject have it wrong (melting
from pressure of blade on ice is insufficient at temperatures colder than
a few degrees below freezing).
Interesting, I ran across a webpage today that rendered absolutely nothing
on the screen, but was still there. Checking out the cached source, I found
this line of script (reformatted):
<script>
PrxOpn=0;
function PrxOpen(url,nam,atr){
if(PrxOpn){
return(window.open(url,nam,atr));
}
return(null);
}
</script>
<html> ... (normal page content)
Interesting in that it looks as if you haven't received a page content,
but in fact you have. Strangely, any links on such a non-page are still active
and can be used to navigate past this proxy-filter page if you click in the
appropriate position in the empty window. I'd call this filter-spoofing.
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The
update-link (above) points to where I last added
some text -- I have so far not implemented a current-entry page, nor a day
per page, but instead stayed with the week-per-page format.
LeufNet
