Gadgetopia

Bill Gates to Receive Honorary UK Knighthood Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates will be awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth Wednesday for his outstanding contribution to enterprise.

My First BillG Review: Here's a funny recollection from Spolsky about the day Bill Gates reviewed his spec for a Microsoft Excel programming language. During these reviews, someone was present to count the number of times Bill swore. "Four," announced the f* counter [when Bill left], and everyone said, "wow, ...

Bill Gates to step down from Microsoft: Wow. But he's always been great from a philanthropic standpoint, so he'll do well just running his foundation. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company he co-founded to spend more time on ...

Report: Bill Gates tops list of charitable givers: Love him or hate him, this is a very good thing. Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are the most generous charitable donors in America, Business Week magazine said on Thursday, as the couple gave away or pledged ...

Bill Gates Net Worth Page: A good page on how much Bill Gates is worth -- $28-some-odd billion right now. There are a bunch of stats to try and explain how much $28 billion is, but here's the most important one: Microsoft claims to have sold approximately 120 Million copies ...

Much has been said about Bill Gates and his generosity, giving millions away to this charity or that, and even starting the world's largest philanthropic organization. But recent reports have linked the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to a group of financiers that have made loans to the tune of ...

Eighteen States Awarded Grants to Sustain Public Access Computing in Libraries: It's really hard not to like Bill Gates when he gives $6 million to libraries. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced grants to 18 states to help public libraries continue to provide no-cost access to computers and ...

Gates 'world's most-spammed man': This is insane. INTERNET junkies, take heart: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates receives four million emails a day, and is probably the most "spammed" person in the world. Via Slashdot.

Bill Gates' House: Here's a nice little image map of Bill Gates' house. You can click on certain areas to get enlargements and descriptions. For instance, his pool: The 17-by-60-foot swimming pool has an underwater music system and a floor painted in a fossil motif. Swimmers can dive under a ...

Jeff Maurone, an intern at Microsoft, shares his experience having dinner at Bill Gates' home. Further and further you descend, past what seems to be an annex library, as it was certainly not the primary librarian that houses the Leicester Codex (Bill's original DaVinci notebook, for which he paid approx ...

High Schools Are 1.0 in a 5.0 World, Gates Says: Addressing the nation's governors, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates delivered a scathing critique of U.S. high schools Saturday, calling them obsolete and saying that elected officials should be ashamed of a system that leaves millions of students unprepared for college and ...

Gates pledges millions to fight malaria: There are times when I hate Bill Gates, and times when I love him. This is one of the latter. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged $258.3 million for research and development to combat malaria [...] The largest of the grants, $107.6 million, will ...

Live 8 an eclectic extravaganza: Bill Gates was brought on stage during the Live 8 concert in London. Geldof appeared onstage to introduce Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist Gates, whom the crowd greeted with a rock star-scale roar. "We can do this, and when we do it will be the best ...

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant: This is so funny it almost has to be fake. Back in 2003, Bill Gates himself tried to download Windows Movie Maker. He got so frustrated, he sent an email to a bunch of people at Microsoft. This is comedy gold. I ...

Gates: In Ten Years, it's a Windows and Linux Game: OS News has a good report on an interview Bill Gates gave at "a conference" (it's not specificed which). The quote of the title seems to indicate that Bill doesn't give Apple a fighting chance. He says some other interesting ...

I have an odd addiction. I just love those little "Read Only" mini-magazines in the computer books section of Barnes & Noble. If you haven't seen them, Barnes & Noble has promotional booklets in every section in which they review new books in that genre. I love the "Read Only" ...

Bill Gates was too busy having tea with the Queen while back at home his always trusty Windows OS was being attacked yet again by a fast spreading worm. He took a moment to comment on the perceived security of Linux and OS X. Noting the large number of major ...

Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world: It s official-ish Bill Gates is no longer the world s richest man. Although they haven t released an official list (that comes in April), Fortune is running an article this week that confirms what everyone has suspected. By our calculations, the 67-year-old Slim ...

How I Work: Bill Gates: Bill Gates wrote this piece for Money Magazine on how his office is laid out and what he does with it all. If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a ...

Bill Gates answers cop's child porn plea: For all the crap we give Bill Gates, this is a pretty good story. A Toronto police officer working in the child exploitation section sent Gates an email asking if he could do something to help stop the spread of child pornography. Gates ...

Clinton's gift to Internet age: only 2 e-mails: You'd think he'd be more prolific, given that his vice-president invented the Internet and all. The archives of the Bill Clinton presidential library will contain 39,999,998 e-mails by the former president's staff and two by the man himself. "The only two he ...

Melinda Gates goes public: Interesting profile of Melinda Gates, wife of Bill. It discusses her philanthropic work and the state of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is crazy-rich, it turns out. [it] has assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world s largest. [ ] Melinda and Bill will very ...

Microsoft Holding Onto Stockpile: Microsoft is sitting on $62 billion in cash and investments. That's billion....with a "B." "In an unusual move, Connors detailed exactly how Microsoft's cash and reserves are broken down. Its total portfolio of $62.7 billion is made up of a treasury-managed portfolio of $53.5 billion, with ...

For the first time ever in the two years I've been blogging, I have closed the comments on an entry. I always thought I could never get enough comments, but the things happening on the semi-legendary Bill Gates entry need to stop. Comments are split between very sad stories, and ...

Bill Joy to leave Sun: It's tough to overstate the importance of this. The man invented vi, for goodness sakes. After more than 20 years at Sun Microsystems Inc., cofounder and Chief Scientist Bill Joy is leaving the company, Sun announced Tuesday. Joy, once called the "Edison of the Internet" ...

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Bill Gates, and I stumbled across this tidbit about his home: According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million. ...

Time names Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates Persons of Year: Bill and Melinda Gates, along with Bono, have been named "Persons of the Year" for their charitable giving. The Gateses, the magazine notes, "spent the year giving more money away faster than anyone ever has." In January, the Bill and ...

The US Torture Bill as C code: debug this, please It occurs to me now that the whole 94-page bill really amounts to a common, one-character programming error.

This article describes how hackers let Microsoft do their hacking for them: Instead of working it out for themselves, malicious hackers are reverse engineering the patches to better understand the vulnerabilities, said David Aucsmith, who is in charge of technology at Microsoft's security business and technology unit. Quite a catch-22; ...

The good Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah is sponsoring a bill that could make possibly any piece of technology (at least the tech that people actually want) illegal. The bill states that if you make or provide a product that 'induces' somebody to infringe on another's copyright you could be ...

Microsoft is pushing to make their licensing program more understandable (all right, quit laughing!) and wants to send you some info to help you on your way. The cool part? The info is on a USB thumb drive. No word on how big the drive is, but free is free. ...

IKEA founder overtakes Gates as world's richest man: Just watch Bill will be found face down in a seedy bar without a nickel to his name this time next year. Ingvar Kamprad, the Swede who founded furniture retail chain IKEA, has overtaken Microsoft's Bill Gates as the world's richest ...

Anti-Porn Bill Targets File Sharing "Online file-swapping services would be required to get parental consent before allowing children to use their software under a new bill to be introduced today in Congress." I read somewhere that attempts to crack down on music piracy wouldn't affect the file sharing apps because ...

Gates Foundation gives libraries nearly $11 million: I'm no huge fan of Bill Gates, but I am a huge fan of libraries, and this makes me pretty happy. The philanthropic organization established by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife is giving nearly $11 million to public libraries in 37 ...

Telecoms lobby against public wireless networks: While we love hearing about community wi-fi projects like those in St. Louis and Taipei, telecommunications companies don't. Providing this service is what they make money doing, and they're actively opposing many community wi-fi projects across the country. A chief complaint: a city can ...

Gates pledges $750m for child vaccines: Say what you want about Bill Gates, he sure does give away a lot of money. He's one of the biggest philanthropists in the world (total speculation on my part...). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $750m to the Global Alliance for ...

"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington. "If you are going to go have people share the computer, ...

Paramount/MTV Taking a Napster: What's stranger, that there's a Napster film in the works, or that it's going to be written by Alex Winter -- who you may remember as Bill (or "not Keanu"), From Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Paramount and MTV Films have given the greenlight to ...

Hi, this is President Bush. No seriously the entry was written by George W. Bush. I'm posting to this blog because it seems like Deane's site is a great way for people to get in touch with the movers and shakers of the world. Apparently a great number of ...

You Send It, You Recycle It: I'm quite pleased with this development. We complained about the idea of disposable DVDs last year. Again, let me say that I'm not a left-wing tree hugger or anything, but there's enough disposable stuff in the world already (and calling it "one-time use" doesn't ...

Michael Dell's House: We've talked about Bill Gates house before, but here are some pictures of Michael Dell's. Here's an overhead show.

More and more, Wikipedia articles are creeping up the search results when you search for famous names. I tested this theory a bit tonight, and here's what I found when searching for nothing but the first and last name of someone famous: Bill Clinton: 3rd result Condoleezza Rice: 2nd George ...

About a year ago, I opined that Wikipedia was quickly becoming a "standard reference," meaning it was a base repository of information about a subject -- the starting point. This is reflected in how high Wikipedia rates when searching for notable people. What I think this points to is the ...

... in only 3 1/2 days. And over a million songs purchased by those Windows users in the same amount of time. See the Apple press release. I wonder how high Bill Gates' blood pressure is by now.

Most of us should be able to appreciate yesterday's Foxtrot. Bill Amend does a good job of weaving techno-babble into his strip every now and then and for the most part, even non-technophiles can understand it.

I played with the Movable Type Tags plugin tonight. It was...almost a great thing. I can see where it would work well for a lot of things, but ultimately, I uninstalled it. The tag concept is actually very simple: it replaces "keywords" with a field called "tags." Then, whenever you ...

Some exciting news for the site -- Later today, Gadgetopia will be joining the FM Publishing network of sites. This group is run by Jon Battelle and Bill Brazell -- Jon founded Wired magazine, and Bill was in the group that started The Industry Standard. These guys have been around ...

It s been another year, so it s time to re-evaluate my theory that Wikipedia is becoming a standard reference and will soon be the number one hit for notable people in the world. Consider my two previous discussions here: The Formation of a Standard Reference from two years ago. The Formation ...

Where's George 2.2 Bill Tracking Report: I got my first "Where's George" dollar yesterday (found it in my pocket this morning). It was entered into the system 14 months ago in Texas. I got it in change at a Subway yesterday in South Dakota.

Bill Gates recently went on a tour of colleges to encourage students to major in computer science. Apparently the number of declared computer science majors is declining, and Bill wants to shore up the numbers. I got to thinking about this, and I wonder if the plethora of really high-level ...

House Passes Tough Computer Anti-Spyware Bill: I hope they arrest the Bonzi Buddy crew en masse and broadcast it live in CNN. By a vote of 399 to 1, the House moved to outlaw a range of aggressive advertising and surveillance activities that have outraged consumers over the past two ...

Live 8: If you want to see what all the fuss was about at Live 8, AOL has published the video. And, in a low-tech remix, this guy has listed them all in a nice table of contents, and deep-linked into them. No sign of the Bill Gates clip, sadly.

What a great problem to have. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the world's richest man, said the tax office in the US has to store his financial data on a special computer because his fortune is so vast. My guess is it's not on a PC or Mac. Read more here. ...

I Need More Images for 'Innovator?': Can anyone help him out? The mosiac looks pretty good already. I decided to create a photomosaic of Bill Gates from images and logos of the companies Microsoft has bought or crushed. I really need more images to finish this. The repetition is way ...

Want to promote your favorite song or artist on your website? Use Apple's iTunes Link Maker to create a link to that song or artist's wares on Apples iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Link Maker lets you connect your website directly to any song, album or artist on the iTunes ...

Bill & Co. have apparently decided that a good PR program is the key to beating hackers, virii & worms. Educate your students, faculty, and staff on the simple steps they can take to protect their PCs. Download the posters from the links below, or place an order and we’ll ...

Google GlobeTrotting: Home: Great site full of Google Maps of famous places, like Bill Gates's house and an Atlanta airport with a half dozen planes coming for a landing or just taking off when the picture was taken (look for the shadows). Why does it feel like Google Maps with ...

SCO sees loss on legal fees: This is a good thing. Let's keep those legal fees high. Someone file a lawsuit against them for just being bastards. Controversial Unix software company the SCO Group reported a loss for its fourth quarter on Monday based largely on hefty legal fees the ...

The new Wallace & Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, exhibits an impressive display of gadgetry. If there is something that needs to be done, Wallace & Gromit have a contraption to fit the bill. Despite the G rating from the MPAA there are a few attempts at subtle ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

Clinton critics corner market on domain names: Bill Clinton's staff didn't register domain names soon enough for his new presidential library: "ClintonLibrary.com is being held for a $9,500 ransom. And Greg Forsythe, a 28-year-old graduate student from Huntsville, Ala., created ClintonLibrary.org to link to other anti-Clinton sites, including the site ...

Kodak to Discontinue Black-and-White Paper: After all, black-and-white is just a couple mouse clicks away from every picture these days. "It's a shame to see it go," said Bill Schiffner, editor of Imaging Business magazine in Melville, N.Y. "Digital has done a lot of good things for the industry but ...

Sun Microsystems CEO steps down after 22 years at the helm: Much like when Bill Gates gave up his title cand become "Chief Software Architect," Scott McNealy is moving to a different position at Sun. Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems (SUNW) said Monday that he will step down ...

Intel recalls flawed chips less than a week after launch: Good for them that they handled this better than the last time they had this problem. Less than a week after the launch, Intel said Friday it's recalling some of its latest chip sets after the discovery of a manufacturing ...

Lawsuit Takes on Microsoft Security Flaws: This kind of snuck in under the radar. There have been rumors for years about Microsoft being held accountable for the havoc its systems wreak when they get hit with another virus. "The company today confirmed that it had received a proposed class-action lawsuit ...

Microsoft Hiring Hypocrisy: An interesting thought on Microsoft hiring policy from Don Park. ...I thought it was amusing that a company started by Bill Gates, a dropout like me, requires its engineers to have a degree. Thinking that it might be a fluke, I checked some software architect positions at ...

Moody's cuts Sun Micro's senior debt ratings: I knew Sun was in trouble, but this puts them one step above junk bonds. "Moody's Investors Service on Tuesday cut its ratings on Sun Microsystems's senior unsecured debt, citing the Santa Clara, California-based company's continued performance decline and challenges toward achieving profitability. ...

House votes for permanent Net tax ban: Good news for everyone. "The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to make a ban on Internet use taxes permanent and require nine states to repeal existing taxes on access fees. Lawmakers passed a bill by voice vote that would cement a ...

For the 2008 Race, Google Is a Crucial Constituency: Interesting article about how candidates are trying to sway to Google vote. LAST century, General Motors assembly plants were a regular stop on the itineraries of presidential candidates. This election cycle, Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has become a favorite ...

Google to sell Dells to corporate customers: Google and Dell are getting really cozy, which probably irritates Bill to no end. new PowerEdge servers bundled with Google's search software to the search outfit's corporate customers. The bundled machines are meant to help companies search for and manage internal documents and ...

Denmark's crown prince engaged to Australian commoner: First he buys schools, then he arranges a marriage to infiltrate Microsoft into the royal family of a European country? "A former project consultant for a Danish division of Microsoft is about to marry a prince. Denmark's future king, Crown Prince Frederik, and ...

Announcing the DocZone Pay-Per-Minute™ Plan!: DocZone is a hosted content management system that just released a fascinating pricing model. What if you could have a complete XML-based end-to-end solution for managing and producing multilingual content for about the same price as you pay for your departmental phone bill? Introducing the new ...

It's floating around the blog-world today that Dell is shipping Firefox pre-installed on all its machines in the U.K. If so, that's deceptively huge news. Blake Ross from the Firefox group has confirmed this. Now if they would only make it the default browser.... Bill Gates must be seriously hating ...

Philly schools get Microsoft brotherly love: Bill Gates just bought his first school. (Sorry, Dave :-) "Microsoft is teaming with the School District of Philadelphia to design and build a new high school wired with the latest in educational computing tools. The District and Microsoft announced plans on Friday to ...

Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill: This is pretty funny. Microsoft's leafy corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, is beginning to look like the streets of New York, London and just about everywhere else: Wherever you go, white headphones dangle from peoples' ears. To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft's ...

Cop 'talks' online to suicidal teenager - Instant messaging persuades boy to abandon threat: A cop talked a kid out of suicide over IM. At about 9 p.m. Thursday, a young woman called Fremont police to report that her 16-year-old ex-boyfriend was despondent and had threatened suicide while sending her ...

NITLE Weblog Census: This group has compiled a database of the blog postings from 600,000 blogs. You can download the list of URLs (3.2 MB), the URLs and meta (5.6 MB), or the complete archive of every single blog entry from 600,000 blogs stretching back to when blogs were knee-high ...

Oracle chief reportedly mulling NFL team purchase: Maybe he could just get a team in a hostile takeover. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, one of the world's richest people, is looking at possibly owning a National Football League franchise, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. Representatives for both the NFL and ...

Microsoft Reader - Welcome, Readers!: Microsoft is promoting its Reader software by letting people download free eBooks for three months. I installed Reader which does some interesting DRM mojo before it starts up (you need to "activate" it with a Passport account) and I downloaded and can read ...

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer, has gone on record saying that he'd sell Dell hardware loaded with OS X, if he could. If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers, Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick has asked several ...

And that effectively took Microsoft, Symantec, Google, Apple, Lycos, and other big hitters offline yesterday. Read about it here. ...the problem stemmed from what a spokesman called a "large scale international attack on the Internet's infrastructure". Akamai said the attack was primarily aimed at the large search engines - of ...

Grub's Distributed Web Crawling Project: LookSmart is using a distributed computing program (a la SETI @Home) to update its index. I don't know if I would participate, since this is a Microsoft-backed, for-profit venture. I'll donate spare CPU cycles to non-profit causes, but Bill's software sucks up too much of ...

Why Microsoft Should Open Source the Leaked Source: From the "never-gonna-happen" department, this guy says that Microsoft should just open-source the code that was leaked last week. He makes a good case, but there's no chance Bill would actually go for it. Why not make lemonade out of lemons by ...

At yesterday's meeting of Apple's board of directors, Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to the board. Link. Schmidt joins the uber-elite crew of Bill Campbell, Chairman and former CEO of Intuit Corp., Millard Drexler, Chairman and CEO of J. Crew, Albert Gore Jr., Former Vice ...

Users Blast Microsoft Over Worm Response: Bill's not making any friends in the security community...again. "Widespread problems with the Blaster patch, issues with the Microsoft-supplied workaround, and a general dissatisfaction with the way the vendor handles updates have led administrators and security experts to lay much of the blame for ...

GalleryPlayer: Don't want to get stuck with the same old art hanging on the walls? This service will "deliver" images to your plasma television (or many, depending on how rich you are), and rotate the image at set intervals. It's based upon something Bill Gates himself has in his home. ...

California wins its first anti-spam judgment: Very good news. "California won its first anti-spam judgment Friday when a court fined a marketing firm $2 million for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails telling people how to spam, the state's attorney general said. Attorney General Bill Lockyer brought the case against ...

FM's Advertising Platform Launch!: FM has launched a somehwat insane ad buying platform to get ads on any of the FM-managed sites (of which we are one). This is something of a personal milestone for John Batelle. Nearly two years ago, while researching my book, I came up with an ...

Lowering the Boom on Copycats: This doesn't bode well for P2P. It strikes me that the combination of stiffer penalties and increased availability of legal alternatives are leading up to someone being made an example of. Unauthorized copies of movies often turn up in flea markets and online "peer to ...

Congress Passes Bill That Will Limit Spam: Yesterday, I would have been thrilled. But after reading this article, I don't know if it matters anymore. The bills would prohibit senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from disguising their identity by using a false return address or misleading subject line. They also ...

I was in the middle of writing my love letter to IE when a SharpReader update popped up. IE7 is on the way. Joy. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced plans to launch a test version of Internet Explorer 7.0 this summer. The company had said that it would not ...

Cuba embraces open-source software: In Cuba, the shift to Linux is ideological. Interesting article. Cuban officials, ever focused on U.S. threats, also see it as a matter of national security. Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, an old comrade-in-arms of President Fidel Castro, raised suspicions about Microsoft's cooperation with U.S. military and ...

No Joke, Bulb Change Is Challenge for U.S.: On the heels of Ireland s decision, the U.S. kills the incandescent. The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes. ...

USATODAY.com - Gates on a future version of Windows: This is from the Bill Gates interview with USA Today. He's talking about the information storage capabilities of Longhorn: "Say you keep lists. Anytime that you've mentioned a restaurant, it automatically goes onto this list of restaurants, and your system would ...

KIMBLE rulez!: I can't believe we're 3,000+ posts into this site and we've never talked about Kimble. Although Kimble's reputation has fallen into disarray of late, he flat blew me away in the late nineties. Kimble was the man. He had the MegaCar and little cartoons with Bill Gates wetting ...

Steve Jobs is a great guy. If you happen to be in the market for a new car, Steve and his friends at Apple have made your choosing a little easier. Steve wants to make sure that you'll be able to take your iTunes with you, so now there is ...

Microsoft Acquires Giant, Plans Antispyware Release: Giant's site has essentially been replaced by a big press release. I didn't use any of their products, but they included Spam Inspector, which I hear was quite good. I wonder how many of Bill's four million emails a day it could head off? ...

Bill Gates says users to blame for security problems: True or not, he's not going to make any friends with interviews like this. "The chief software architect (CSA.'.) told IT Business that perfect code wasn't the answer to security problems, but firewalls and keeping the software up to date were ...

Gates still the richest, but Google guys moving up: Once again, I am not on the list. But, once again, it's dominated by geeks. Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, was the nation's wealthiest person for the 11th straight year with a net worth of $51 billion [...] Perhaps more ...

Brothers sue Net company, win $4.3 million: Now they can hand that $4.3 million over to me for all the pain and suffering I went through looking at those stupid X-10 ads for so long. "The Vanderhooks created Advertisement Banners.com from their parents' Yorba Linda home. It was one of ...

Tech titans wish we wouldn't quote them on this baloney: An investigation into some famous quotes that tech titans never said. For instance, Bill Gates is famous for having said "640K ought to be enough for anybody." But: Over and over, Gates has denied saying this, and no evidence seems ...

On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble: Google has a fascinating little problem on its hands, courtesy of its daycare center. Employees are wicked pissed, which will likely make for an exodus of talent. [Employees] who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs ...

Here's a quick little graph showing how traffic has increased over the last eight months. Click the little image (or here) for a much larger version. The trendline tells the story we've solidly doubled page hits. And this is just to the HTML pages God (and Webalizer) only ...

Aquatics and Arena Facility Construction Cam at the University of Prince Edward Island: There's a great webcam here that will show you time-lapse of the last hour (by minute), the last 24 hours (by hour), and since the beginning of construction (at 11 a.m. every day; nothing much happens during ...

A methanol fuel cell may soon be powering your laptop computer. "MTI Micro unveiled the latest prototype of its direct methanol fuel cell, a power supply that is about the size of a deck of playing cards and promises to let handheld computers, cell phones, and other small computing devices ...

I've been reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" as an eBook in Microsoft Reader. It's been a great experience, and I'll write more about it later, but today I went looking for other eBooks at Amazon, and I was amazed at the prices. Consider: The Complete Idiot's ...

Gates reveals his 'magic solution' to spam: Just imagine if he actually did it and become "The Man Who Solved the Spam Problem." The world would herald the savior. That's enough to give Apple die-hards a shiver. The battle to rid the world's in-boxes of spam has got itself a ...

Closing Microsoft: Fascinating concept here: just close down Microsoft. Bill Gates said he wants to keep running the company until it's no longer fun. Dvorak opines that this time has come, and he explores how you would just shut down a company like Microsoft. Absurd, but interesting. As this is ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...

Slashdot is reporting that Dell has begun selling PCs without an OS pre-loaded. The machines are bare except for BIOS, and they ship with a FreeDOS CD. While seemingly small, this is a huge step away from Microsoft. Microsoft is so paranoid about retail machines not having Windows that they ...

World s Richest Person: In my mind, it s not true until Forbes says it s true, and they re not issuing a new list until next April. Gates has been on top of that list for 12 years now. Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim is the world s richest man, worth an estimated $67.8 billion, ...

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a stock image from Corbis to use in a Web site I'm developing. It was a standard hi-res image of a man standing in front of a building reading a newspaper. This should have been simple... For those that don't know, Corbis is the largest ...

On Kiddie Records Weekly you can download mp3 audio files of famous (and not so famous) kids story records from days gone by. Only one set of files is available for download on any given week, but links for BitTorrent feeds are available for all preceding weeks. With titles like ...

Here's the problem with taxonomies and content categorization schemes: no one will maintain them. You can set up the greatest content tree or grouping structure in the world, but sooner or later, content authors (yourself included) are going to get complacent. That's because the value-add is on the reader's end ...

Microsoft's Most Exclusive Franchise: Included in the European Union's report on Microsoft was a memo to Bill Gates from a Microsoft executive. In it, he talks about how hard it is to move away from the Microsoft Windows API once you've started using it to build your software: It is ...

Schools ask parents to pay up before kids log on: Fullerton wants all their kids to have laptops. And they want all the parents to pay for them, The public school system in this quiet city 27 miles southeast of Los Angeles is pushing the frontiers of computer technology in ...

Sounds like the long expected release of Office 12 for the Mac is well on it's way through the halls of Redmond's Mac Business Unit. The thing most potential customers are looking forward to is a version that will run natively on Intel Macs, but it will also have many ...

Wired has a fascinating article on how SCO went from being a small-time Linux vendor to a big-time pain in the can under the steerage of CEO Darl McBride. McBride has also received death threats, a challenge to a fistfight, and a flood of denial-of-service attacks targeting his company's email ...

How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions: A classic story of a consulting nightmare. These folks hired IBM to come in and create a "knowledge management portal." Hillarity ensued. We had expected IBM to stay for about three months, which all by itself would have blown our budget, given ...

Let's get ready, now: This is a little look into what's shaping up as a political battle over RSS. Apparently the major blog systems can't settle on a standard, and Dave Winer has a brutal (yet probably accurate) explanation on how Bill Gates is going to use this to his ...

Restaurant Reservations Go Online: Interesting story about the dominant restaurant reservation service. These guys found a hole in an industry and have filled with with something so indispensable that it has become a requirement. And that, folks, is how you get rich. All restaurants have to do it, whether you ...

Create ASP code for your database with ASPRunner: This is pretty good software. I downloaded the demo, walked through the wizard, and within 3 minutes (from download to finished interface) I had a complete set of pages to view, edit, add, print, search, and export a database table on my ...

Lighting the key to energy saving: It's amazing that a massive change like this is so close to our reach, yet the human race will probably do nothing about it. A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. [...] The carbon dioxide ...

Outsourcing: Beyond Bangalore: Apparently outsourcing in India is running into the same problems as everywhere else. I knew the polish was going to wear off this thing before long. After 10 months of working with software developers in Bangalore, India, Bill Wood was ready to call it quits. The local ...

I'd like to give a hearty thumbs-up endorsement to the Mac as a productivity tool for developers, but I've found a chink in the 'super-cool-and-usable' armor, and no way to plug it: Subversion integration. Yes, you can absolutely install subversion on a Mac and use it in a terminal. But ...

I have the need for a new office router. We only have a couple of people, so a normal home router would be fine, except that we're geeks, so we need more than one external IP. Most home routers don't handle that. You can snag yourself a fancy Cisco PIX, ...

The Apple Store has a Special Deals section where they sell refurbished hardware, and there are some sweet deals going on (don't let the word "refurbished" scare you off; you get what is basically new hardware and the standard warranty without the new hardware price.) For instance, you can pick ...

My office is considering buying a new copier/printer. Have you looked at these things lately? I've been through a half-dozen vendor presentations in the last few days (they talk a long time when the price tag approaches $20K), and I can't believe the functionality available. One vendor dropped off a ...

I've been completely frustrated with the level of political discourse this year here in the US. With only two months left in the election, neither candidate has come forward and provided a detailed plan for what they'd like to see happen for the future. "I'll put more money in the ...

Why does "reading" get confused with "surfing the Net" so much? I'm struggling lately with the concept of a hobby, and why I don't have one. It seems that everything I do is in some way connected with my company. I have no balance. I got to wondering the other ...

Steganography is very cool. No, it's not a dinosaur &mdash it's a method of sending hidden messages so that no one knows a message has been sent. Well, that's just boring ol' cryptography, you say. No when you encrypt a message and send it, anyone who intercepts the communication ...

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that ...

Prompted by Microsoft's generosity, I've started reading e-books, and I think I'm addicted. I read a book last year called "The Social Life of Information" which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren't going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I'm hooked. ...