Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, November 28, 2002

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Group raises concerns over use of open source: "A US trade association, the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), has urged the US Defense Department (DoD) to rethink its use and promotion of free and open-source software." [Google Technology News]

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DNA patterns produce ultimate personalised gift: "Items bearing colourful patterns based on the recipient's own genetic fingerprint are being touted as the ultimate personalised gift." [Google Technology News]

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Scripting News writes: "Doc Searls introduces Technorati." Here is how the Technorati site tells of itself: "Cosmos allows you to find what's new in the blogging universe, and find out who's linking to whom. Simply type in a URL for a blog, website, or interesting article on the web, and Cosmos will tell you which bloggers are linking to the URL." This is a great concept, and provides some unique insights into the blogosphere.

Which one: PowerBook or ThinkPad? -- Comment()
Today I submitted to an IT magazine an article where I compared the IBM ThinkPad T30 with the PowerBook G4. (See a previous posting.) I must say that comparing the two portables was an interesting experience. I learned a lot about the current portable computers. I believe I made a good choice in replacing my current desktop machine with a PowerBook.

It is of course clear that ThinkPad and PowerBook are aimed at different markets. You could say that the two machines are like the Lady and the Tramp. The PowerBook suits a wizard of digital media, whereas the ThinkPad suits a salesman demonstrating his products on the go. They both cost the almost the same (the DVD-ROM model), and both have their advantages. Thus, depending on your requirements, making the choice between these two machines is probably easy. At least for me it is so.

What I would really like to test, if I had the time, is having the ThinkPad with Linux installed. Somehow the neon-colored Windows XP doesn't fit the robust-looking ThinkPad at all.

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The Laptop Performance Bottleneck: "As convenient as mobile computers are, they have always been sluggish compared with desktop PCs. Hard drive speed has been the biggest bottleneck. But there is good news for notebook users: The performance gap is, if not closing, at least narrowing. Will the fastest laptop computers ever be as fast as the fastest desktops?" [osOpinion]

Based on my experiences of the 1 GHz PowerBook G4, it seems that for most users the new portables are fast enough. Some portables may have poor ergonomics, but that is another question. A more pressing concern is the power consumption of the new portables. The PowerBook is quite good in this area, but wouldn't it be good for the battery to last a week on a single charge?

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Typesetters are not machines: "I tell you three times: Typesetting is not conversion. Typesetting is not conversion. Typesetting is not conversion. A plea hit my inbox today for help with a so-called “mass conversion” of SGML and non-marked-up ASCII text to PDF. I turned it down. Firmly." [Caveat Lector]

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Hard Wired for Music: "Neurologists at McGill University are studying how music is hardwired in the human brain, and that the pleasure we get..." [Blogcritics]

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Microsoft Unveils Licensing Discounts To Counter Linux: "Microsoft has unveiled a licensing discount policy to discourage its business customers from switching to Linux or other open source alternatives. Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio told NewsFactor that if Microsoft sales reps believe there is a serious risk of losing a customer, they can request authorization to offer discounts of up to 50 percent." [osOpinion]

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NASA Breakthrough Method May Lead To Smaller Electronics: "NASA scientists have invented a breakthrough biological method to make ultra-small structures that may well be used to produce electronics 10 to 100 times smaller than today s components." [Google Technology News]

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New worm, Winevar, damaged but dangerous: "A new e-mail worm is circulating that has the potential to severely damage machines that it infects, potentially deleting all the files on a computer's hard drive while mocking the machine's owner..." [Google Technology News]