Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, November 14, 2002

This is the 1003rd posting -- Comment()
This is my 1003rd posting to the Universal Rule weblog (counted by the Radio item numbers). It took a little less that three months to write this many postings. How long will it take to reach the 2000 or 5000 postings milestones?

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XServe cluster achieves 217 GigaFlops: "Dauger Research today announced that its software achieved over 217 billion floating-point operations per second on a cluster of 33 XServes from the Applied Cluster Computing Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)." [MacMinute.com: Up-to-the-Minute Apple Mac News]

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Red Hat wins over Windows convert. "Linux seller Red Hat--which chiefly looks to displace Unix rivals--announced today it has landed a customer that is bumping aside Microsoft Windows in favor of Red Hat software for its database servers." [Google Technology News]

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Hyper-Threading: best thing since sliced thread?: "In basic terms, Hyper-Threading takes the CPU's unused resources and applies them to other threads where possible. It only works with Windows XP, which detects the HT chip as two processors. This theoretically makes it faster in multithreaded apps, but could also speed up multitasking between apps that use different parts of the processor." [The Register]

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Boing Boing Blog writes that Giant, erect condom welcomes Bill Gates to India: "An eight-foot high inflatable condom greeted Bill Gates today during a visit to Hyderabad, India. The unusual welcome gesture was intended to commemorate the Microsoft chairman's generosity in fighting HIV/AIDS through his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

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Boing Boing Blog writes that Apple laptops kick Windows boxens's asses in price-performace shootout: "The Mac Observer has compiled a wonderful roundup comparing laptops from Apple, Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba at various price-points ($3000, $2300, $2000, $1600, 1300, and $1000). The Macs win on almost every axis, but consistently fail to match PC boxen for L1 cache.

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Microsoft on Security: We'll Break Your Apps: "Not only new versions of Windows will be patched or improved, but as I understood they also plan to force security updates for older versions of Windows down peoples throats. Even if that means that some applications will mallfunction. Nice to see Microsoft taking reponsibility for their mistakes, but they really should have done so when they designed Windows." [Privacy Digest]

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JOHO the Blog writes about Why Spam Doesn't Work: Masha Geller of MediaPost thinks she's figured out why response rates to spam are so low:

Email marketing company Silverpop yesterday released the preliminary findings of a study they conducted on response rates to permission email and found that one of the most overlooked causes of reduced response rates is "broken" or unreadable HTML.

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Scripting News writes: "I'm doing an interesting project to backup a Radio installation into the cloud. Eventually this will allow people to synchronize work between office and home, a common feature request. In the process, I found a new use for RSS, as an interchange format for weblog software. Almost everything we store about a weblog post is now suppored by RSS, and for those bits that aren't, we can define a namespace. I feel this in some way ratifies the work we did with RSS 2.0. If it can handle all that a reasonably mature blogging tool can throw at it, it's getting pretty mature itself."

I wish this works out. However, what about the disk space requirements? I hope the data storage format will not be too verbose.

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Incredible Images of the Sun: "A new swedish telescope facility in La Palma uses a new technology to remove the blurriness of the atmosphere to snap new and astonishingly sharp images of the sun. Want to have a closer look at the surface of it? Reminds me of paintings I did as a kid." [Slashdot]

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Apple details File System Journaling: "Mac OS X Server version 10.2.2 provides a new journaling feature for the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system which enhances server availability and fault resilience. Journaling protects the integrity of the file system on Xserve and other computers using Mac OS X Server in the event of an unplanned shutdown or power failure. It also helps to maximize the uptime of servers and attached storage devices by dramatically expediting repairs to the affected volumes when the system restarts." [The Macintosh News Network]

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Metafilter points to NY Times on You Are a Suspect: "A growing awareness by those on the right and on the left that our rights are now seriously in threat of total erosion in light of new Petnagon proposal to track all moves of citizens in giagantic data base."

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Redwood Asylum writes about Real World Klog Pilot:

Klogging pilot recap.. Rick Klau masterfully wrote up his firm's pilot of Radio UserLand. Valuable lessons on plannng, deploying, and socializing a klogging tool. [a klog apart]

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Boing Boing writes about the sweet new thing from Nokia, a cellphone with a full keyboard:

"On Tuesday, Nokia introduced the 6800--a new GPRS/GSM device [which] *does* include a full keyboard." Excerpt from PCWorld:

Nokia appears to be the first manufacturer to include a keyboard in an ordinary cell phone, setting the unit apart as a legitimate text messaging device. It also includes Instant Messaging; multimedia messaging service and Short Messaging Service; access to any POP3 or IMAP e-mail account; and an x-HTML Web browser. The handset, which will ship in the second quarter of next year, uses Nokia's own proprietary Series 40 OS and browser, not its newer Series 60 design. The Series 60 is the platform design that Nokia is selling to other handset manufacturers such as Sendo, which includes the Symbian OS plus an HTML browser from Opera."

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Garrison Keillor on Fire: "Garrison Keillor is flaming. As one of our culture's best story tellers ever, and as someone who has trademarked a transparent gentleness and a genuine civility, this outburst is remarkable. It's short on particulars because, as the end reveals, it comes not from offended reason but from a broken heart." [JOHO the Blog]

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Apple Backup 1.2.1 Available For .Mac Members: "Apple on Wednesday released an update to its backup utility for paid members of .Mac." (MacCentral via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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The Best Value Apple Portables Ever: "Despite the rumor mills and the premature Website update, Apple managed to surprise us." (MacOPINION via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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The Case for OpenOffice: "What is free, easy to learn and manage, and compatible with other file formats and every major platform? (Hint: It also represents one less tie to Microsoft.) The answer is OpenOffice.org, according to the creators, managers and evangelists of this open source office productivity suite." [osOpinion]

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Under the Hood of OS X: "Apple has not been shy about trumpeting the Unix underpinnings of OS X, but Steve Jobs and Co. have left users on their own when it comes to exploring the system's command-line capabilities. By clicking the OS X terminal application, users can open the door to a world of Unix functionality. So, what's under the hood of Mac OS X?" [osOpinion]

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Standing up against legal threats: "Small-time web publishers, fanzine writers, and webloggers have had little or no chance of standing up against The Man when sent a legal letter or email asking them to "cease and desist" with whatever it is they are publishing online. Not until now, that is, thanks to the arrival of Chilling Effects." [WriteTheWeb]

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What is a k-log?: "Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging (knowledge-logging). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps?" [WriteTheWeb]