Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Surprise! Education Sites Are Cool. After a decade of online experiments, museums are focusing on a mission that is much closer to home: building educational Web sites for young audiences. By Matthew Mirapaul. [New York Times: Education] 7:42:25 AM      Google It!.

Australia's Great Linux-Based Satellite Network [Slashdot] 7:40:49 AM      Google It!.

Maybe the Music's Just Lousy?. The recording industry insists that CD sales are off because everyone's online stealing the music. Now a study comes along saying that piracy has little, if anything, to do with stagnant sales. [Wired News] 7:37:42 AM      Google It!.

The Subtle Tyranny Of Spreadsheets [Slashdot] 7:34:58 AM      Google It!.

PeopleSoft sued for $510m over 'vapourware'. 'Concealments were willful, malicious, and done with ill will and spite' [The Register] 7:33:16 AM      Google It!.

UMassOnline Revenue Grows 39% and Enrollments Grow 32% in FY 2004 - TMCnet. UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts' web-based learning division, today announced that online education program revenues and enrollments grew 39 percent and 32 percent, respectively, in FY 2004 (July 1, 2003 - June 31, 2004). Revenues from the [Online Learning Update] -- this represents the success of a good model with rudundant delivery on competative systems and content development on a degree by degree basis rather than piecemeal course by course - they seem to understand synergy. BL 7:32:15 AM      Google It!.

Magnetic fields may cause childhood cancer. No causal link, however, and research continues [The Register] 7:26:04 AM      Google It!.

Circuit City buys InterTAN for $284m. Big in Canada [The Register] more on why mall retailers all have the same stuff -- BL 7:25:01 AM      Google It!.

Blogs + playlists = collaborative listening. 7:21:34 AM      Google It!.

Macromedia Flex. The Flex strategy first began to crystallize two years ago when Macromedia rolled out the Flash 6 player, Flash MX development tools, and ColdFusion MX server. The possibilities were exciting, and the back-end environment was comfortably based on Java and Web services. But the client-side discipline was alien to the corporate programmer. One obstacle was the ActionScript 1.0 language, which lacked the strong typing and formal class model that a Java programmer would expect. The solution to this problem arrived last fall when Flash MX 2004 introduced Flash Player 7 and support for ActionScript 2.0. Yet the Flash IDE was still built around the concept of making a movie, not coding an application. Flex presents a development model that will make immediate sense to an enterprise developer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] The sample Flex app that appears in the story is the RSS reader that Macromedia's Christophe Coenraets wrote. I guess RSS readers are now the official benchmark for next-generation markup-driven development. Here's the same thing done in XAML. ... [Jon's Radio] 7:18:37 AM      Google It!.