Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Sunday, November 3, 2002

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Up to half of world's plants at risk: "The percentage of the world's plants threatened with extinction is much larger than commonly believed, and could be as high as 47 per cent if tropical species are included, researchers said on Thursday." [Google Technology News]

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A bug to clean the environment: "A bacterium that thrives by feeding on a common pollutant may provide a means to help clean up contaminated soil and ground water, scientists reported on Thursday." [Google Technology News]

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Sam Ruby writes about the Voice of an Angel: "Returning back to the land of the living, I spend a moment and download a song that Phil and Shelley are raving about. It blows me away. Then I read about how it came about. I am thrilled. Makes my adventures with managed serendipity look tame. Then I come across this. I am speachless. My only reaction is that I'm not worthy. My wife beats me at Trivial Pursuit (though I am the one who knows how many feet are in a mile). I can play twinkle twinkle little star on the piano only because I memorized the numeric sequence 1,1,5,5,6,6,5... [...] P.S. Shannon - your RSS does validate."

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Mac Net Journal writes: "MacOSXLabs.org is a site devoted to implementing OS X in computer lab settings. I stopped by the site today to take a look at information about the new freeware program RsyncX 1.7c, which adds a graphical user interface to the rsync utility built into OS X that can mirror files, folders, or entire disks from one machine to another, over a network or across the Internet. I am adding RsyncX, which has support for HFS+ disks, to my ongoing outline OS X apps ranked by category."

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Coyote Gulch writes about the MS settlement:

What a disappointment John Ashcroft has been. I was not that surprised last fall when his DOJ negotiated the Seattlement with MS. It was widely expected that they would take the view that the MS monopoly was good overall.
Dave Winer: "Large companies don't innovate in software. To think they do is as wrong as it would be to believe that large corporations write innovative scripts, screenplays, novels, songs, plays. Government has yet to figure this out, nor has Microsoft or other big companies."
Robert Cringely writes this week that scientific research is doing just fine, just not in the traditional places.

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SourceForge Project of the Month compiles Unix software for Mac OS X: "SourceForge.net, a popular open source development Web site, today announced its SF.NET Project of the Month for November. The Fink project is an attempt to bring the full world of Unix open source software to Darwin and Mac OS X." [MacMinute.com: Up-to-the-Minute Apple Mac News]