Microsoft won't certify 802.11a-only gear: In an interesting effort that seems to have good intent behind it, Microsoft won't certify any 802.11a standalone gear, according to News.com's Ben Charny. Rather, they will certify only dual radio devices, which should be available in large numbers by the fall. It's odd to use a technical certification to change market behavior. You don't need a certified driver to use 802.11a; regular drivers work, too. But users will be concerned by the warnings that Windows XP generates for drivers that aren't approved by Microsoft's testing lab. [via Olivier Travers and Alan Reiter]

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In November, Harvard's Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. trumpeted to The New York Times that he had discovered the first-ever novel written by a female African-American slave, ''The Bondwoman's Narrative,'' by Hannah Crafts. He sold the book to Warner Books, which touted the ''magnificent discovery.'' Gates later declared that the book ''could be our first pristine encounter with the unadulterated `voice' of a fugitive slave'' - even though the writer's actual identity has yet to be established.

Before publication, Gates sold an excerpt to The New Yorker, to which he is a frequent contributor. Almost immediately after picking up the magazine, a Princeton graduate student in British and American literature, Hollis Robbins, recognized passages copied from Charles Dickens's ''Bleak House.''

Instead of being abashed, Gates decided to celebrate Crafts's copying from Dickens. Using faddish jargon - not a retraction, not an apology - in a letter to The New Yorker, Gates explained that Crafts ''was seeking a relation to a canonical tradition, finding in Dickens a language and rhetoric that she sometimes assimilated and sometimes simply appropriated.''

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