Why Vista will mean the end of the Microsoft monolith

And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?

Site – http://observer.guardian.co.uk

The bootless PC and terabytes on a dime

Imagine a PC with instantaneous boot up or storing 10TB of data — 10,000 gigabytes — on a device the size of a dime with data-transfer rates unhampered by any latency. Those are just two examples of the promises that storage nanotechnologies hold: combining the functions of memory chips and disk drives on a single piece of hardware that is a fraction of the size of devices today. Nanotechnology, the science of engineering functional systems at the molecular scale, holds the possibility of billions of infinitesimally small machines working together to build products from the ground up using readily available materials.

Site – http://www.computerworld.com

How To Be Human

If this year’s winner of the Loebner Prize is on the right track, call-center data could be what’s needed to achieve the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI): creating a computer program smart enough to hold a natural conversation.

Site – http://www.technologyreview.com

Hezbollah Hacked Israeli Military Radio

Newsday is reporting that Hezbollah was able to monitor secure Israeli military communications, perhaps using technology supplied by Iran, during the recent Lebanon war. A former Israeli general, speaking anonymously, called the results ‘disastrous’ for Israel. The story reports that an anonymous Lebanese source said that Hezbollah might have taken advantage of Israeli soldiers’ mistakes in following secure radio procedures. The radio gear uses frequency hopping and encryption.

Site – http://it.slashdot.org

The coming RIA wars: A roundup of the Web’s new face

A host of powerful new methods for rapidly creating compelling browser-based software (aka Rich Internet Applications) have recently come to market, or are rapidly heading there. While the technique getting the most press by far these days is still Ajax, there are a number of new approaches that are intent on dislocating this often finicky and hard to work with — though very powerful — browser software model. The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.

Site – http://blogs.zdnet.com

Baby Bang experiment could open door to new dimension

Deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border, someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions. The Large Hadron Collider – a 27km-long circular particle accelerator at the CERN experimental facility near Geneva, will smash protons into one another at unimaginable speeds trying to replicate in miniature the events of the Big Bang. The fundamental goal of the massive machine is to answer the basic but crucial question of how matter was created at the birth of the universe.

Site – http://www.nzherald.co.nz

James Holden

Far from your average DJ-producer. With his shaggy hair and vintage Judas Priest t-shirts (with authentic holes) he sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the clean-cut short-haired bloke’s bloke DJs whose unremarkable faces adorn the pages of the dance music press. (“I don’t trust anyone who is cleaner than myself!” jokes James). Musically he is also a million miles from the faceless repetitive beats mentality of so many of his peers, much more likely to be listening to leftfield albums from the likes of Mogwai, Four Tet or Boards of Canada than the latest essential mix CD. James Holden is a young man plotting a course through the music world all of his very own, putting some personality back into dance music and refusing to stay in the pigeonholes where other people seem so keen to shove him.

Site – http://www.jamesholden.org