Microsoft is now dropping another one of their "case studies", a 12 year old boy who supposedly used Encarta to write a paper.  This is related, of course, to their recent Switcher fiasco.   [ Go ] [ Previous Articles ]
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Mandrake 9 has been released and the question that comes to mind is would I go to Mandrake 9?  I wrote a fairly nasty but accurate flame about Mandrake some time ago and, even so, I still considered it.  Thankfully OS News and Slashdot saved me the trouble of trying. I'm backing up my notebook now and getting ready for a RH 8 install.  Thanks again to Jeremy for letting me download the ISOs from him.  [ OS News ] [ Slashdot ]
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newSyst is a (strangely named) PHP based blogging tool.  I have downloaded this but I haven't done anything with it.  It's PHP based and uses MySQL for storage.  I'm not fond of the permalink format which is basically just a CGI url.  Still it might give a starting code base for a derivative blogging tool and that's not all bad.  No RSS support that's evident.  [ Go ]

Another person building a PHP based blogging tool is Ashifi.  No code released yet.  [ Go ]

And yet another PHP based blog tool is Phosxom which is based on Rael's Blosxom.  Very cool stuff.  This seems to be the one of the more sophisticated tools (he's looking into supporting Ping Back and the Blogger API).  [ Go ]

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BottomFeeder 2.0 looks like a very interesting RSS application for reading and displaying formatted feeds.  Given that I have an aggregator in Radio I'm not a good candidate user but I'm sure that others will like it.  [ Go ]
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3 More Microsoft Security Patches are released.   If you are technical then you should probably make sure that you're up to date on these fixes for Windows Help, SQL Server and Outlook / Word Excel.  Please fill in previous anti-Microsoft engineering practices here.  Writing them is just too damn easy.  You can probably even just imagine the words I'd write.  [ Go ]
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Via Slashdot.  Very cool -- New fighter plane from Boeing.  I don't want to get into the ethics of the military at all but I will comment that stealth technology is just plain fascinating.  Yes I intended the pun.  Couldn't help myself.   [ Go ]

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Chris Pirillo is absolutely furious (that's a polite way to describe it) over Palm's use of email marketing.  While I could point out to him that my new Inbox Buddy product could solve this for him, I won't.  Oops I guess I did. ;-)  Still this problem is industry wide and it's not just Palm.  Everyone plays fast and loose with "opt in" email mailing lists and Palm alone shouldn't get his venom.  But I will agree with him that it's bad when an industry leader like Palm does this.  (Explanation: Palm apparently bought lists with all three of his email addresses so now he gets the Palm Voice at home, at work address 1 and at work address 2). [ Go ]

Apparently this email is delivered by M0.Net and I'll have to add them to our list of blocked addresses.  What's really ridiculous is their policy on being removed:

Digital Impact is concerned about consumer privacy. If you would like to unsubscribe from an email list, please forward the email you received to ADDRESS or draft an email to ADDRESS with your email address and a description of the list from which you would like to be removed. [ Go ]

Why should I be forced to describe it?  I'm forwarding you the email !!!  You figure it out.  You sent it to me !

Just as a general comment to the email marketing industry, if you don't clean up your act, you will find yourself in a world of hurt.  Blocking tools are getting better and better every single day and your entire business model is going to implode if you continue with your current business practices. 

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The BBC reports on "Americans Angry Over Corporate Pay".  It's really interesting to see this appearing in the BBC.  [ Go ]
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Via Scripting.  Mitch Ratcliffe talks about ethics in blogging.  [Go ] [ My Earlier Post on This ]

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Dan Gilmor is doing a great job blogging Poptech.  I probably should have gone like Buzz recommended.  Ah well.  Next year. [ Go ]
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