Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

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Fighting the spammers head on: "The amount of spam is growing and could soon make e-mail unworkable[cedilla] say anti-spam experts." [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]

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How Much Hack Info Is Too Much? "When security company Symantec publishes details of a Web browser bug that lets hackers control affected computers -- and even erase the hard drives -- industry insiders wonder if full disclosure is a good thing. By Michelle Delio." [Wired News]

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Tales of Oz, Wonderland Go Online: "A digital library of international children's literature puts best-loved classics and new stories from around the world at kids' beck and call. By Kendra Mayfield." [Wired News]

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I looked at the Radio UserLand Ranking and was suprised to see that this weblog was number 5, with 2,055 daily page reads. This was a suprising development. This is more readers than this weblog has ever had, by a wide margin. I hope readers realize that my PowerBook G4 review is work in progress, and not a finished text. I added some intro text to this effect.

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Scientific American Reviews 'Simputer' PDA: "It doesn't look like much. A drab, gray piece of plastic, about five inches long and three inches wide. A black-and-white screen, three inches by two inches, showing a few simple snippets of text. And yet this nondescript little computer may hold the key to bringing information technology to Third World countries. [...] The device is known as the Simputer. I recently got a chance to evaluate one of the preproduction models that have been put together by the Simputer Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Bangalore, India. This year Encore Software, a Bangalore company that licensed the technology from the trust (not to be confused with the California software company of the same name), plans to sell thousands of the handheld devices, capping an effort that began in 1998." [Slashdot]

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dive into mark writes about New reading: "By looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100), and filtering out sites that don't have RSS feeds (plus a few I already know I don't want to read), I came up with a list of recommended new reading."

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Linux' Security Problems Outstrip Microsoft's: "According to this newsfactor story, a new study has been published by Aberdeen Group that claims open source software is..." [kasia in a nutshell]

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Report from the ACM DRM Workshop: "There's open skepticism from researchers about the ability of DRM to solve Hollywood's copy protection problems. Read Edward Felten's review. Papers from the workshop are available online as well." [Privacy Digest]

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A new, super-human level of computing power? "A press release issued today at the Supercomputing 2002 conference by both the Department of Energy and IBM announced that IBM has won a contract to build two of the most powerful computers known to humanity. The computers will be affectionately named "ASCI Purple" and "Bluegene/L", and will purportedly have processing capabilities of 100 Teraflops and 360 Teraflops, respectively (and many reports are making much of the fact that some scientists believe the computing power of the brain is around 100 Teraflops, nevermind the AI)." [Ars Technica]

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Comdex: Apple's Schiller, Microsoft Talk On Digital Hub: "Panelists and moderator alike agreed that the future of the digital home is only starting to take shape, with changes in technologies over the next few years allowing for a level of connectedness and simplicity that isn't possible ... yet." (MacCentral via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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The PowerBook Mystique: "I guess that if you have to explain the PowerBook (and iBook ) mystique to someone, there[base ']s a good chance they are not going to get it." (MacOPINION via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Biologists seek better IT tools, panelists say: "Collaborative, problem-solving software is necessary." [InfoWorld: Top News]