Archive | December, 2004

Linked from Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog: Too controversial. As Tom Smith says… Perfect.

Why Nerds Are Unpopular. “If you’re too cool for school, you’re probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships.” By Paul Graham from Wired magazine. Wired News

Paul is doing a great job of syndicating essays from his latest book, “Hackers and Painters.”

News.Com: Who says safe computing must…
News.Com: Who says safe computing must remain a pipe dream? Bruce Schneier: “Two years ago, I published a list of PC security recommendations. The idea was to give home users concrete actions they could take to improve security. This is an update of that list: a dozen things you can do to improve your security.” Link via Tomalak’s Realm

In Jon Udell’s December 9th weblog entry, he points to several interesting Internet Calendar exchange projects going on. It’s surprising to realize that there is no single standard that lets us all exchange free/busy time, invite people to events, or synchronize meetings with clients/employees/vendors, etc. Such a standard is overdue.

CNET News.com reports This week in the wild, wild Web. “At Oracle OpenWorld, Sun CEO Scott McNealy inadvertently illustrates how easy it is to fall for a high-tech hoax.” McNealy shoud be ashamed. Any good engineer ought to know better.

I got a real kick out of the picture, as it illustrates, in the background, a control center nearly identical to the on the submarine I served on from 1981-1986. It was a chilling flashback for me. At one time or another, I worked at all three of the consoles pictured, and can rattle off what each component is to this day, twenty years later.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I worked on a DECWriter similar to the one in the foreground, in college in the 70’s.

And, no, we didn’t get to watch TV on the submarine.

With the release of Thunderbird, some folks complain that it isn’t an Outlook-killer, as it doesn’t have built in calendaring and task lists (it does have an address book). The Mozilla Foundation is building separate components for most of those features, whereas the Mozilla (nee’ Netscape) browser had everything on one executable file. Jon Udell takes a look at the Sunbird calendar in Jon’s Radio today and reports: Mozilla Calendar. “It’s been a while since I looked at Mozilla Calendar, so this morning I installed the Firefox version and gave it another whirl. My first reaction was that this descendant of Netscape’s calendar program must share a lot of DNA with the original — it feels a tad clunky, UI-wise, in the same kinds of ways…”

InfoWorld: Top News reports that China’s Lenovo to buy IBM’s PC business. “TOKYO – China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. signed a definitive agreement on Wednesday to acquire IBM Corp.’s personal computing division. Lenovo will pay US$1.25 billion in cash for the business, which is expected to transform it into the world’s number three PC maker, the companies announced.”

This is certainly a worry for those of us who depend on the reliability and ruggedness of our ThinkPads. While the manufacture of the machines has been outsourced for years, the responsibility has always fallen to the company with those three letters on the case: IBM. Expect a conservative IT market to shy away from the machines for a while. With luck, the spinoff can be as successful as the Lexmark deal.

Follow-up: A news.com editorial opines “Why Lenovo-IBM is a tough sell“

InfoWorld: Top News reports that China’s Lenovo to buy IBM’s PC business. “TOKYO – China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. signed a definitive agreement on Wednesday to acquire IBM Corp.’s personal computing division. Lenovo will pay US$1.25 billion in cash for the business, which is expected to transform it into the world’s number three PC maker, the companies announced.”

This is certainly a worry for those of us who depend on the reliability and ruggedness of our ThinkPads. While the manufacture of the machines has been outsourced for years, the responsibility has always fallen to the company with those three letters on the case: IB/font>. Expect a conservative IT market to shy away from the machines for a while. With luck, the spinoff can be as successful as the Lexmark deal.