PC104 Linux Minicluster from the geniuses (and I mean that in a good way) at Sandia National Laboratories (via Slashdot).

Something about those pictures arouses a deep tech lust in me.  This happens to me all the time.  I really want a cluster of 3-1/2 by 3-3/4 inch computers, but I do not need them.  <muttering>Just another thing to soak up free time...</muttering>

11:38:54 PM   

MS in Peruvian open-source nightmare. The FUD isn't working [The Register]

I'm not voting in another US election until I get the option of voting for someone at least as clueful as Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez.  This is how politicians can act when they're not wholly-owned subsidiaries.

10:13:03 PM   

Register: "A new media service called Rendezvous automatically discovers other Mac users and drops their shared playlists into iTunes' Source panel."  [Scripting News]

Apple's introduction of Web-based features in its new OS (including iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDrive, and others) are going to help it differentiate itself going forward.

Apple deserves our gratitude for making it easy for their customers to exercise their fair-use rights.  Why be thankful?  We will only become outraged at the Hollings bill (CBDTPA/SSSCA) and DMCA when we realize what's being taken away from us.  Without Apple's marketing savvy ("Rip, Mix, Burn"), it's all a bit abstract.  Apple is showing us what we stand to lose.

8:29:33 PM   

W3C: An XHTML + MathML + SVG Profile. This could finally be the TeX replacement that I've been waiting for. [Hack the Planet]

There's a heck of a lot of irony in this story.  The origin of the Web (HTTP and HTML) is pretty well known.  A physicist at CERN thought it would be cool to use computer networks to connect physics papers together automatically.  The idea: whenever an academic paper referred to another paper, clicking on that reference in the first paper would take you directly to the second one.  And hypertext was born.

But academics love to put charts and graphs in their papers.  More than that, they like to use complicated mathematical symbols.  They soon discovered the Web couldn't do either of those things well.  So academics quit using HTML and went back to the publishing system TeX.  Search for an academic paper on the Web and you're likely to find a URL ending in .ps.

This new profile the story refers to might finally make it possible for academics to use HTML (well, XHTML, technically) to publish papers.

12:59:37 PM