If you’re using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to the free OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better / faster / cheaper MS Office is than OpenOffice. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this Competitive Guide
is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it
Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof and would also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing. They dubbed the bill Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004
, or the Pirate Act
Pet owners in the US city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, may soon be required to provide seat belts for pets if the city council approves new rules. Under the proposed regulations, animals travelling in the open beds of cars and trucks would have to be tethered
Development One Australia is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable
That’s what Picsel is promising… Picsel Browser runs on BREW V2.1 and beyond, and will allow users to display Flash, video, Microsoft Office, and even Adobe Acrobat files. And Picsel reckons the breakthrough will be for the benefit of network operators
GreyMagic Software has detected a serious security flaw in Yahoo’s Web e-mail service and Microsoft’s Hotmail service, which could allow hackers to run malicious scripts on users’ computers
Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
Nuff said. Good article. You can even just read the sub heads and you get the idea. Some of my fave sub heads from this are:
- 1. Talent is one-third of the success equation
- 2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work
- 3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important
- 7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance
- 10. The rest of the world counts
Documentation of an insane office prank involving 2,500 Post-it notes and one mild-mannered victim.
Damon has been playing tricks on me for a few days now. So I came in on the weekend and did some
re-decoratingin his office. He didn’t see it until Monday morning when he came in and opened his office door.
His office blinds were closed, his door was shut and locked, and I left this post-it in the middle of his door. It says
Can you pick up some more post-its, we’re running low.
The pranksters notified Post-it manufacturers 3M, and received three cases of Post-it notes for future decorating
.
Another prankster opted for the use of those hideous Marshmallow Peeps. Lots and lots of Marshallow Peeps.
We did mail Just Born, manufacturers of Peeps, but sadly they never got back to us. The peeps wound up staying in the office for about two years, through at least two occupant changes. Even six months after they were up we had people coming by and eating them off the ceiling. Ugh.
Yet another office joker thought covering all available surfaces with eggs would be a hoot:
Brian still doesn’t budge.
There’s something you have to see,he says.
I walk over to my desk and see the following: Everyone in R&D is waiting to see my reaction. Unfortunately, I’m still in panic mode about being late. So, I run over to my desk. It is covered in eggs, complete with a live bird in a cage. After a beat, I say,
Huh.
Then I turn to Brian and say,
Okay, we gotta go.
Despite President Bush’s pledge that homosexuals ought to have the same rights
as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation
Jumping electric charges could waft breezes of ionised air through microchips, replacing the bulky, noisy fans that cool down today’s computers. Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana say their patent-pending technology could be built directly into a computer chip’s heat sink to provide a faster, quieter and lighter cooling system than the alternatives
The European Union on Wednesday issued its ruling in the long-running case against Microsoft, fining the American software giant US$613 million, the heaviest punishment in any European competition case to date. European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti ruled that Microsoft had failed to provide to rivals information that they needed to compete fairly in the market for server software and that the company has been offering Windows on the condition that it come bundled with Windows Media Player, stifling competition
Limited edition Emily Strange Epiphone guitar
I want one. You can win one now or buy one from the web site in April.
Check out the specs on the Epiphone site
The New Zealand government is about to define a small part of the rights assumed by the fair use
clause in the Copyright Act 1994. Essentially they are going to protect the consumers’ rights to convert media from one format to another for personal use, making it clearly legal to transfer tracks from a commercial CD to a mix-CD, MP3 player, PDA, PC, 8-track, or tuned array of hummingbirds. NZ law already makes it clear that gifting or reselling items includes a transfer all of rights, including copyright, warrantee, and licencing agreements, so providing your original is the genuine article you’re not a criminal
In the latest sign that a standards war is petering out, Toshiba has introduced dual-format DVD recordable drives. Toshiba’s Storage Device Division announced on Monday drives for notebook computers and desktop systems that support the -R/RW
and +R/RW
technologies. The so-called dash
and plus
formats have been at odds when it comes to DVD recording, but more and more manufacturers are building both technologies into their machines to make things simpler for consumers
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane‘s dismissal of renewable energy and energy efficiency as neither practical nor affordable
at the Coal Plan launch demonstrates a government badly out of touch with modern clean energy technologies around the world
Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his pot-in-pot refrigerator
. It consists of a smaller clay pot inside a larger clay pot. The gap is filled with damp sand. As the water evaporates, the inner pot cools. Food that used to spoil in a few days now stays fresh for weeks. Second-order effects are already being noticed — for one thing, girls who had to skip school to sell food at markets can now attend classes
Joel Zahn has case modded an Underwood No 5 typewriter into a rather spiffy computer. I’m torn between the sacrilege of destroying an Underwood and the coolness of the finished article. Andy France decided that he needed to build a small Windows XP machine and the perfect case would be Windows XP box. To avoid confusion on a dual boot system, he has a toggle switch to boot from a Red Hat Linux box when Linux is needed
New dual-layer DVD-burning drives will be released very soon by Philips and Sony that will double the capacity of DVD drives, making a complete copy of your dual-layer DVDs theoretically possible. It will use dual layer technology that will hold up to 8.5GB, and will cost around $230 for an internal and $330 for external, burning all 8.5GB in approximately 45 minutes
www.apple.com.au/accessibility
Finally, Apple Speaks to the Blind
You can talk to your Mac
The next major-ish release of Mac OSX could feature built-in assistive technologies such as screen readers, spoken items and QuickTime: Closed Captioning just to name a few.
Yeah so what! You say, you can get this software for Windows! You whine. Yeah well it ain’t free with your OS like the mac solution will be! Ha! It’s built into the OS, not some add on! Ha, again!
The You can talk to your Mac article also has an interesting rumour on the one button mouse front. The rumor is that Apple is working on a mouse with an iPod like circular touchwheel, damn nice. Hmmm… that could mean a circular mouse. Could this be the puk mouse revisited and actually good? Only time will tell.
Mark Maughan, an accountant and professional moron, Googled his name and found some alarming, false, misleading and injurious
information about himself and his firm. Therefore, he is now suing Google, Yahoo (which used Google as its search engine at the time), AOL (for using Google to enhance its search results) and Time Warner (because they’re the same company as AOL) for libel. Specifically, his lawyer John Girardi believes that Google’s PageRank algorithm takes known good information and twists its context when displaying search results
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