October 27, 2003

Oxford University Professor Andrew Wilkie who summarily rejected an inquiry from an Israeli PhD student for a research position in Wilkie’s group because he was an Israeli was been suspended without pay for two months for this discrimination. 11:25:41 PM

Microsoft unveiled details of the next generation of the Windows operation system, code named Longhorn at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Robert Scoble has coverage of this event as does many others. 11:06:18 PM

Intel carried out its scheduled price cuts this week, reducing the cost of the Pentium 4 chips for the desktop by between 7 and 35 percent. In response AMD cut the prices of its Athlon XP chips but not the Athlon 64 chips, which so far has no competition from Intel as the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip is not yet available to the public. The next Intel price cuts will be in Feburary 2004. 11:04:36 PM

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Andrea Levin, Executive Director of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America takes aim at New York University history professor Tony Judt, contention that Israel should be replaced by a binational one shared with the Palestinians. Levin notes that such an entity would be soon be a Palestinian majority state and once that occurs the history of Jews in the Arab world indicates that the Jews in the country would subject to persecution. She also notes that it is wrong from Judt to identify the Jews as a people not deserving a state and wonders why Israel is singled out for condemnation. Update: Nelson Ascher takes further aim at "Tony Judt’s despicable and by now notorious essay" writing that the experiences of French Jews show that Zionism is a reluctant nationalism which is completely at odds to Judt’s writings. (via Yourish) 11:04:13 PM