March 29, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST What's Going On? By PAUL KRUGMAN Source Democratic societies have a hard time dealing with extremists in their midst. The desire to show respect for other people's beliefs all too easily turns into denial: nobody wants to talk about the threat posed by those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself. We can see this failing cleaby archive - Archive
NASA Tests Shape-Shifting Robot Pyramid for Nanotech Swarms NASA News 03.29.05 Source Like new and protective parents, engineers watched as the TETWalker robot successfully traveled across the floor at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Robots of this type will eventually be miniaturized and joined together to form "autonomous nanotechnology swarms" (ANTS)by archive - Archive
La Vida Robot How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. By Joshua Davis April 2005 Source The winter rain makes a mess of West Phoenix. It turns dirt yards into mud and forms reefs of garbage in the streets. Junk food wrappers, diapers, and Spanish-language porn are swept into the gutters. On West Roosevelt Aveby archive - Archive
Desktop manufacturing Fabulous fabrications Mar 23rd 2005 From The Economist print edition Source A way to help inventors in poor countries realise their ideas STAR TREK had the replicator—a device that could assemble any object, atom by atom. The Nutri-Matic vending machine concocted drinks molecule by molecule in “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, personalising them by analysing anby archive - Archive
Economics focus Old before their time Mar 3rd 2005 From The Economist print edition Source Labour-market reform remains the key to higher living standards IN MANY European countries, calls for economic reform are heard more often than they are heeded. However, a new report by the OECD, “Economic Policy Reforms in OECD Countries: Going for Growth”, deserves attention. It may aid reform by proviby archive - Archive
Inflation targets Monetary conundrums Feb 24th 2005 From The Economist print edition Source America's monetary policy is off target “YOU are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do,” Montagu Norman, the Bank of England's longest-serving governor (1920-44), is reputed to have once told his economic adviser. Today, thankby archive - Archive
Buttonwood Companies on a borrowing binge Mar 29th 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda Source America’s companies are cash-rich, right? Then why have they started borrowing again? THE Family Buttonwood having callously decided to go skiing over Easter, your correspondent was left scrabbling solo at the coalface. And a good thing it was, too. With time to devote to such previously unmined trby archive - Archive
Global liquidity Saturated Feb 24th 2005 From The Economist print edition Source The world's giant money printing-press HOW loose is the world's monetary policy? One gauge is that real interest rates in America and other countries are still negative. Another is that global liquidity has been expanding at its fastest pace for at least 30 years. This deluge largely reflects the combiby archive - Archive
Photonics Startup Pegs Q2'06 Production Date By Mark Hachman March 28, 2005 Source Startup Luxtera has announced its plans to enter the CMOS photonics market, anticipating the day when microprocessors will transmit information via light, not electrons. The company claims that its optical modulator for transforming electrons into photons runs at 10-GHz, ten times the speed of an optical mby archive - Archive
On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures by Dorian Birsan, Eclipse From Software Updates Vol. 3, No. 2 - March 2005 Source Extensible application architectures such as Eclipse offer many advantages, but one must be careful to avoid "plug-in hell." Plug-ins In a world of increasingly complex computing requirements, we as software developers are continually searching for that ultimby archive - Archive
Tool turns English to code By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News March 23/30, 2005 Source Writing software has been relatively difficult since people began programming computers in the mid-1900s. Although programming a computer is eminently useful -- it gives you fine control of a powerful tool -- it requires learning a programming language. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute oby archive - Archive
DNA Key to Decoding Human Factor Secret Service's Distributed Computing Project Aimed at Decoding Encrypted Evidence By Brian Krebs washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Monday, March 28, 2005; 6:48 AM Source For law enforcement officials charged with busting sophisticated financial crime and hacker rings, making arrests and seizing computers used in the criminal activity is often the easy partby archive - Archive
Java fallout: OpenOffice.org 2.0 and the FOSS community By Bruce Byfield 2005.03.28 Source Several new features of the recently released OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta require a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Since Java's license is neither free nor open source, a small but vocal minority has responded both strongly and negatively. For instance, when NewsForge recently published a review of theby archive - Archive
South Korea Steps Up Linux Use in Public Sector Asia Pulse 03/28/05 8:18 AM PT Source Last year, the Ministry of Information and Communication in South Korea encouraged eight government agencies to adopt the Linux operating system and it is now gaining traction, the ministry said in a statement. South Korea said today it will launch a government-wide promotion to increase the free use of the Lby archive - Archive
Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend By TODD BENSON March 29, 2005 Source SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 28 - Since taking office two years ago, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has turned Brazil into a tropical outpost of the free software movement. Looking to save millions of dollars in royalties and licensing fees, Mr. da Silva has instructed government ministries and state-runby archive - Archive
Buttonwood Measure for measure Mar 23rd 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda Source Bond investors are becoming increasingly rattled by trifles. Does this imply a crisis, the “measured” return of rational pricing, or neither? BUTTONWOOD is not the only one who considers General Motors the slowest-moving car crash in history: the bonds of this former blue chip have been trading like junk forby archive - Archive
The Daily Reckoning London, England Thursday, March 24, 2005 The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: For anyone living in the 20th century, the rising cost of living is nothing new. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the dollar has lost about 95% of its purchasing power. Chris Mayer explores our other options for making sound investments... THE DECAY OF PAPER CURRENCY by Chris Mayer Inflation,by archive - Archive
The Daily Reckoning London, England Thursday, March 24, 2005 The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Millions of Americans have been viewing their humble abodes as their own, personal ATM. Marc Faber looks at this phenomenon and wonders when people will realize that they shouldn't have everything riding on their household assets... PUTTING YOUR ASSETS ON THE LINE by Dr. Marc Faber Let us assumeby archive - Archive
The Daily Reckoning London, England Tuesday, March 22, 2005 The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: The new bankruptcy bill may deter some debtors from further "credit card kamikaze," but if property prices decline, the bill could leave millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages. Rick Ackerman explores... BORROWERS SHOULD GO FOR BROKE by Rick Ackerman As indebtedness in its many inby archive - Archive
Rolling out next generation's net BBC News Saturday, 26 March, 2005 Source The body that oversees how the net works, grows and evolves says it has coped well with its growth in the last 10 years, but it is just the start. "In a sense, we have hardly started in reaching the whole population," the new chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Brian Carpenter, says. Theby archive - Archive
A New Company to Focus on Artificial Intelligence By JOHN MARKOFF Published: March 24, 2005 Source SAN FRANCISCO, March 23 - The technologist and the marketing executive who co-founded Palm Computing in 1992 are starting a new company that plans to license software technologies based on a novel theory of how the mind works. Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky will remain involved with whatby archive - Archive
Banks eye bootable Linux CDs By Renai LeMay ZDNet Australia March 24, 2005 Source Australian company Cybersource says it's currently talking to two domestic banks about providing Linux-based bootable CDs to consumers to ensure Internet banking security. The company yesterday released information about its Online Banking Coastguard solution. Coastguard is based upon Knoppix, a Linux distrby archive - Archive
Microsoft criticised for IP address configeration patent Ingrid Marson ZDNet UK March 23, 2005, 16:20 GMT Source An organisation that campaigns for the reform of the patent system criticised Microsoft on Wednesday for filing a patent with a claimed similarity to the address auto-configeration mechanism of IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol. The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) claimby archive - Archive
Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene By NICHOLAS WADE March 23, 2005 Source In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier. The finding implieby archive - Archive
NewsForge Why Novell's internal migration to Linux desktops is a landmark 2005.03.23 By Joe Barr Source SALT LAKE CITY -- There have been so many announcements, so much activity, such a hurried pace to the Brainshare 2005 conference that I think many may have overlooked the big story. It was thrown out in an almost offhand manner during Novell CEO Jack Messman's keynote address on Mby archive - Archive
Novell preps Linux Desktop 10 It plans to go head-to-head against Windows News Story by Cathleen Moore Source MARCH 23, 2005 (INFOWORLD) - Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the forthcoming version of Novell Inc.'s Linux Desktop offering will go head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said this week at the company's annual BrainShare gathering in Salt Lake City.by archive - Archive
March 18, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Ugly American Bank By PAUL KRUGMAN Source You can say this about Paul Wolfowitz's qualifications to lead the World Bank: He has been closely associated with America's largest foreign aid and economic development project since the Marshall Plan. I'm talking, of course, about reconstruction in Iraq. Unfortunately, what happened there is likely tby archive - Archive
How to Battle the Coming Brain Drain Older workers are retiring in droves. How do you prevent their crucial knowledge from leaving with them? FORTUNE Monday, March 7, 2005 By Anne Fisher Source If you scan the reams of "best advice" in the preceding pages, you'll notice a pattern: Many of the key advice givers are older and wiser bosses. No surprise there. It's the managerby archive - Archive
Firefox explorers By Nigel McFarlane March 22, 2005 Source When Bill Robertson decided last year to switch 450 workers and 100 desktops at De Bortoli Wines to the open source Firefox web browser, he had the company's future in mind. In moving to the free Firefox, he did more than just install a web browser that rivals Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which comes for free with every PCby archive - Archive
The Age of Missing Information The Bush administration's campaign against openness. By Steven Aftergood Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005, at 4:23 AM PT Source The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said Wiby archive - Archive